CleanPhotos · iOS 17 or later · Last updated 1 August 2026
Contact: [email protected] — please include your iPhone model and iOS version.
That is iOS, not the app. Deleted photos move to Recently Deleted in the Photos app and stay there for 30 days so you can get them back. The space is not released until they leave that album.
To release it now: Photos → Albums → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All. After that, Settings → General → iPhone Storage will show the change.
iOS presents its own confirmation dialog for every batch of photos an app deletes, and it caps how many can go in one batch. Cleaning up 800 photos therefore means three dialogs. The app tells you how many to expect before it starts.
Similar photos are identified by what the image looks like, not by metadata, so two shots of the same wall or the same document can land together. That is why nothing is preselected in large groups and why every group stays editable. If a group looks wrong, tap to change the selection before cleaning up.
The scan compares photos taken close together in time, which is where near-duplicates almost always come from. The same picture saved twice months apart is caught by the exact-duplicate check instead — but a similar (not identical) pair separated by a long time can be missed. If you hit this often, tell me: the time window is a number I can change.
Within a group it scores sharpness, faces (how many, and whether the eyes are open), resolution and file size. It also follows what you have already told iOS: a favorite is kept, and an edited version is preferred over the original.
It is a suggestion. You can change any of it.
The first scan reads every photo in the library once. After that the app remembers what it analysed, so later scans only look at what changed — usually a second or two.
No. All analysis runs on the device, and the app makes no network requests at all apart from the App Store purchase, which iOS handles. See the privacy policy.