Moving photos without duplicating

Question

Moving photos without duplicating

Hi there! I have an iPhone13 Pro. This is my first iPhone. One thing I miss about my androids, is that you can move photos from one album to another WITHOUT duplicating the photo which 1) saves on storage and 2) really helps organize your photos (like an electronic scrapbook). But for some reason, I only see an “ADD to album” option on my iPhone. So every time I try to organize my pictures and keep certain ones together, they are ALL duplicates so it takes SO MUCH MORE TIME to go through them. Does anyone know how to help me with this? If this isn’t possible currently, I would surely hope that it’s a part of a software update in the NEAR future….please? 😕

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 17

Posted on May 5, 2024 11:08 PM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,438 points

May 6, 2024 12:47 AM in response to sarahemily1215

They're not duplicates and they're not wasting space.

Photos, (like iPhoto,Aperture, Music, iTunes) is a database. This means it can be very flexible and powerful, if sometimes a little confusing. The library is the core of the app. Every image is in the library. Albums are virtual, and are just subsets of the library. In fact, Albums are not places, they are lists - instructions to the app to 'display this group of images together'. So images do not get "moved" to Albums, they get added to that particular list. This means that an image can be in more than one album but use no extra disk space. Similarly in the Music app, all the tracks are in the Library and can be added to any number of playlists.

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Answer 2

May 6, 2024 1:09 AM in response to sarahemily1215

It appears that the ability to move photos between albums is not available...

"Add to album" only has the copy function and not the cut function. Maybe the only workaround is to add your photos to a new album and then delete them from the original one😕

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