CleanSwipe — Support

What the app does

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. Nothing is deleted until you open the bin and confirm, and the confirmation tells you exactly how many items and how much space.

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.

Getting a photo back

Photos and videos are not gone. Deleting through CleanSwipe moves them to Recently Deleted in Apple's Photos app, where iOS keeps them for about 30 days.

Open Photos → Albums, scroll to the bottom, open Recently Deleted, select what you want and tap Recover. This is Apple's own safety net and it works whether or not CleanSwipe is still installed.

Files are different. A file removed from a folder you granted may go to the Trash or may be erased outright, depending on where it lives. The confirmation screen says which before you tap it. If it went to the Trash, look in the Files app under Browse → Recently Deleted.

Why the space did not come back yet

Because the photos are still in Recently Deleted. iOS holds them for about 30 days and they occupy storage the whole time. That is the price of the safety net.

If you want the space now and you are sure, empty Recently Deleted in the Photos app yourself. We deliberately do not do that for you.

Why these photos were grouped 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. There is more on that in the privacy policy.

Groups are capped at eight so that every frame is visible and choosable. If a run is longer than eight, you get more than one group. That is deliberate: 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 — and 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 your 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.

Sharing the unlock with your family

One person pays once. Everyone else in the same Family Sharing group gets the unlock at no extra cost, and there is no code to pass around — it arrives through the Apple Account. A Family Sharing group is six people at most.

What the person who bought it has to switch on. On their iPhone: open the Settings app, tap their name at the top, tap Family Sharing, then Purchase Sharing, and make sure it is turned on. If they are not the organizer of the family group, the organizer needs Purchase Sharing on for the group as well. That is the whole of it.

What everybody else does. Install CleanSwipe from the App Store on their own Apple Account. The app is free, so it is an ordinary download, nothing to buy. Open it, and the unlock is already there.

If it has not appeared: open the unlock screen in CleanSwipe and tap Restore a previous purchase. That is the fix in nearly every case, especially if the purchase was made before Family Sharing was switched on. If it still does not appear, check that each person has Share Purchases switched on in their own Family Sharing settings, and that the app has not been hidden from the buyer's purchase history.

One thing worth knowing up front, because it is Apple's rule rather than ours: if the person who bought it leaves the family group, or turns Purchase Sharing off, the unlock goes with them. Everyone else returns to the free tier. Nothing anyone has already deleted or kept is affected, and the buyer keeps their unlock.

Restoring a purchase

New phone, or reinstalled the app? Open Settings → Unlock in CleanSwipe and tap Restore a previous purchase. Make sure you are signed in to the same Apple Account that bought it.

If it still does not restore, write to us. Do not buy it twice — Apple will not charge you twice for the same non-consumable, and if something is wrong we would rather fix it than have you try.

Refunds

Apple handles all App Store refunds; we cannot issue one, and we never see the payment. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in, and choose the purchase.

If you are asking for a refund because the app did not do what we said it does, tell us as well. That is a bug report we want.

Adding and removing folders

The app can only see a folder you hand it through the system picker. Add one from the scope screen; remove one in Settings, which discards the app's access to it immediately.

If a scan reports that it could not delete from a folder, the usual cause is that the grant was revoked or the folder moved. Re-add it and try again. The app treats that as a failure and tells you, rather than skipping the file quietly.

The first scan is slow

It is, and on a large library it can take minutes. The app is looking at every picture on the device to work out which ones resemble each other, and that work happens on your phone rather than on a server.

The result is cached, so the second scan is much faster. With the unlock, that cache survives between scans permanently and the app can do the work overnight while charging, so you rarely wait at all.

Permissions

• Photos. Required to show and delete photos. You can grant full access or selected photos only; with a selection, the app only sees that selection. Change it in iOS Settings → Apps → CleanSwipe → Photos.
• Notifications. Optional. Only used for occasional local reminders to take another pass. Nothing is sent anywhere to arrange them.
• Folders. Granted one at a time, by you, through the file picker.

The app never asks for contacts, location, microphone, camera or health data, because it has no use for any of them.

Accessibility

The app supports Dynamic Type, VoiceOver, Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency, and offers a light theme, a dark theme, or whichever the system is set to. Every swipe has a button that does the same thing, so nothing requires a gesture.

If something is unreadable, unreachable or unlabelled, that is a bug and we want to hear about it. Write to us and say which screen.

Privacy

No account, no server, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party SDK. The app makes no network request of its own — the only connection that ever happens is Apple's, and only if you buy or restore the unlock. Your photos never leave the phone. The full statement is in the CleanSwipe privacy policy.

Contact

Norvela LLC, United States. support@norvela.app.

We are a small studio, so answers come in hours or days rather than minutes, and they come from the person who wrote the code.