A burst is one of the best deals in photography and one of the worst deals in storage. Forty frames to guarantee that nobody blinked, then forty full-resolution files living in your library forever.
Real bursts live in their own album
When iOS records an actual burst, it stores the frames as one stack, not forty separate photos. You can thin it out in place:
- Open Photos → Albums → Media Types → Bursts.
- Open a burst and tap Select... at the bottom.
- Swipe through the frames and tap the circle on the ones worth keeping. iOS marks its own suggestion with a grey dot.
- Tap Done, then choose Keep Only Favourites.
The frames you did not pick are deleted; the ones you kept become normal photos. Keep Everything does the opposite — it explodes the stack into individual photos, which is almost never what you want.
The catch: most of your near-identical shots are not bursts
This is the part that surprises people. A stack only exists if the camera actually recorded a burst — on recent iPhones that means sliding the shutter button left, or holding Volume Up if you have enabled that setting. Holding the shutter records video instead.
So the far more common pattern — tapping the shutter four or five times because you were not sure about the first one — produces four or five completely independent photos. They are near-identical, they waste exactly as much space, and they will never show up in the Bursts album. Nor in the Duplicates album, since they are not copies; see our guide on deleting duplicate photos for why.
Finding them by hand
There is no album for "photos I took four times". The manual approach is to scroll the main library and watch for runs of similar thumbnails — they sit next to each other because they share a timestamp. It works. It is also the slowest possible way to spend an evening, and the thumbnails are too small to tell which frame is actually sharp.
Picking the keeper
When you do compare frames, three things decide it fastest:
- Eyes open, on everyone in the shot.
- Sharpness on the subject — not the background. Zoom in on a face rather than judging the whole frame.
- Timing — the frame where the expression or the motion peaked.
Where Flick fits
Flick groups both kinds: real burst stacks and the loose sequences that iOS never grouped. It scores each frame for sharpness on-device and marks a suggested keeper with a star, then shows the group full-screen so you can compare properly. Keep the star, stage the rest, confirm the batch. Nothing is deleted until you confirm, and no photo ever leaves your device.
Flick is free to try on the App Store — one-time purchase, no subscription.