Photo Phatigue

Apple’s Photos app, in theory, should be a perfectly organized digital shoebox of memorable moments and creative inspirations. Instead, it’s become a bottomless pit of duplicates, blurry mistakes and whatever happened to be in my pocket when I forgot the camera was on.

I call this condition Photo Phatigue™—a very real, very tiring condition caused by the impossible task of trying to clean up duplicates in my Apple Photos library without losing my will to live.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t ask to have 12 copies of the same picture. Maybe I tried to AirDrop it and failed. Or maybe I transferred the same photo library between devices so many times it’s started duplicating itself, like a Gremlin after midnight.

You'd think Apple would have a simple feature in Photos to detect and delete duplicates.

You’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

Instead, every iOS upgrade seems to come with a new useless feature like "make photos dance to music." They've added albums like "For You" and "Memories," which basically is 12 more versions of the exact same photo you already didn’t delete, but with a jazz soundtrack.

For the younger kids reading this (stops to laugh at the idea any young people are reading this), you don’t remember the glory days of film cameras. Back then, we had 24 shots. Total. That was it. You actually had to think before you pressed the shutter. You had to commit. If Grandma blinked in the group photo, tough luck—she was mid-sneeze for eternity.

But now, we can take 237 versions of the same moment in 3.6 seconds. And we do. Because we can. We’ve combined the power of technology with the attention span of a goldfish.

Sure, there are third-party apps that claim to clean your duplicates. Some actually do a decent job, if you trust them not to delete your wedding photos while keeping 14 screenshots of your grocery list. I've heard it said there actually is a duplicate removal feature in Photos. But I don't have time to look for unicorns, or leprechauns or the Holy Grail. And I don't want to have to send out a search party to find out what should be obvious, native functionality. This is basic. Like spellcheck. Or autocorrect.

Apple, you’re a trillion-dollar company. Can you please just give me a “Find Duplicates” button that's in my face and works?

Until then, I’ll keep scrolling. And swiping. And swearing.