The finder did its job and shows one photo living in four places. Deleting the wrong three is easy and keeping the wrong one is quiet but permanent - the keeper decides the quality and the organisation of your whole library.
For true exact duplicates, any copy is the same file, so the choice is about where the keeper lives, not what it is. But many groups are near-copies: the camera original, a compressed version an app made, and an edited version. There the choice matters a lot. This page gives the keeper rules in order: the original location wins, the largest full quality file wins, the edited version is a separate photo, and anything you are unsure about goes to the staging folder, not the bin. And as always in this guide set: backup first, review before you delete, and let deletes sit in the Recycle Bin or a staging folder for a week before they become permanent.
Your keeper should live where your library is organised - the main Pictures folder, the year and month folders, the album you actually browse. Copies in Downloads, Temp, chat folders and random app folders are the spares. When a group spans both, keep the library copy and mark the strays.
This rule also protects your future self. A year from now you will look for the photo in the library, not in a downloads folder you emptied in spring.
If the copies in a group have different file sizes, they are not exact duplicates, whatever the tool calls the group. One of them is the original and the others are smaller versions an app produced. Messaging apps are the biggest makers of these - they shrink photos hard before sending.
A brightened, cropped or filtered version of a photo is a different photo with its own value, even though a similarity scan will group it with the original. Keep both, or decide by eye which one you love - but never let a bulk action decide. The same applies to a photo and its screenshot, and to RAW plus JPEG pairs from a camera, which are partners, not copies.
Some groups you simply cannot judge quickly: same size, different folders, names changed by some app. For those, move the spare copies to the staging folder instead of deleting. Live with the library for a week. If nothing is missed and nothing breaks, the staged copies can go for good. Doubt is information - it means the decision deserves the slow path.
The full cleanup, from the first scan to the final delete, is shown live in the video.
Watch Full VideoThen they are exact duplicates and the content is identical, so keep the one that sits in your organised library - the main Pictures or album folder - and let the copies in Downloads, WhatsApp and Temp folders go, into the Recycle Bin or staging first.
It looks fine on a phone screen, but it is a compressed version with detail removed. Print it, crop it or view it on a TV later and the loss shows. Keep the large original as the keeper; the small copy is the one to remove.
Both, unless you decide by eye that one is worthless. An edit is a separate photo, not a copy. A similarity scan groups them together, but bulk delete must never run on that group.