Your camera roll is mostly the same picture, over and over.

What it does

Fourteen shots of one sunset. Nine of a menu you photographed to remember later. Screen recordings you watched once and never opened again. That is most of what is taking up the space.

CleanSwipe finds the clutter in your photo library and in folders you point it at, then shows it to you one card at a time. Swipe one way to keep, the other way to put it in the bin. It groups near-identical shots so you can pick the good one and bin the rest in a single pass, which is where most of the time is saved.

Nothing is deleted until you say so

Swiping something to the bin does not delete it. Nothing leaves until you open the bin and confirm, and the confirmation tells you exactly how many items and how much space before you tap it.

Even then, photos and videos are not gone. They go to Recently Deleted in Apple's Photos app, where iOS keeps them for about thirty days. That is Apple's own safety net and it works whether or not CleanSwipe is still installed.

It also means the space does not come back straight away — those items sit in storage for the full thirty days. If you want the space now and you are sure, you empty Recently Deleted yourself. We deliberately do not do that for you.

How it decides what belongs together

The app compares what pictures look like, not when they were taken. A hundred sunsets shot over five years land in the same pile, which is usually what you want, because they are the same picture a hundred times.

Photos with people in them are treated differently. When a face is present the app groups much more tightly by date, so your children at four and at nine do not end up in one group with eight of them marked as spares. The app only asks whether a face is present — it never identifies anybody.

Groups are capped at eight so every frame is visible and choosable. If a run is longer than eight, you get more than one group. You should never be asked to bin something you were not shown.

What is free, and what the unlock adds

Free, with no limit and no time bomb: the whole files side — duplicates, junk, big downloads — plus unlimited swiping and sorting of everything else, plus 50 photos or videos you can actually delete. That 50 is a lifetime total, not a monthly allowance, and it is shown to you before you start rather than sprung on you at item fifty.

The unlock is a one-time $6.99 purchase. No subscription. It removes the photo cap, remembers the slow analysis between scans so rescans take seconds instead of minutes, and lets the app do a scanning pass overnight while the phone charges. It is shared with your Family Sharing group and it restores on any device signed in to the same Apple Account.

If you run past the free allowance, the items over the line stay in the bin. They are not deleted and they are not thrown away.

What it collects

Nothing. CleanSwipe has no account, no sign-in and no analytics. It opens no network connection of its own — the only network traffic it makes is Apple's own purchase check. Your photos are read on the device and never leave it.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.

What you need

• An iPhone. CleanSwipe is an iPhone app — it is not built for iPad.
• Permission to your photo library. Grant full access rather than selected photos: with a selection the app can only see the photos you picked, which is correct behaviour but makes the grouping useless.
• Nothing else. No account, no email address, no sign-up.

Something not working, or a photo you want back? The support page covers recovery, permissions, restoring a purchase and refunds.