I cleaned 2,300 photos off my iPhone with a 4.7 MB app

Disclosure: OnePhoto (a.k.a. Swipe Cleaner) is a partner product in the Nomos network I contribute to. The messy camera roll and opinions are my own.

My camera roll hit 38 GB last week. Mostly screenshots of Slack threads, boarding passes from 2024, and six near-identical photos of the same whiteboard.

I tried the built-in Duplicates album first (Photos → Albums → Utilities → Duplicates). It merged about 400 exact dupes, which was nice, but it ignores "similar" shots — the five slightly different angles of the same thing. That's where most of my junk lives.

A teammate pointed me to OnePhoto. It's a swipe-based cleaner: left to delete, right to keep, up to favorite. Two things made me actually finish the cleanup instead of abandoning it halfway like every other time:

1. Nothing gets deleted while you swipe. Everything lands in a review queue and you confirm the batch at the end. I caught two photos I'd swiped wrong, so the queue paid for itself in the first ten minutes.




2. It's 4.7 MB. No account, no upload, all on-device. Freeing up storage with an app that itself eats 300 MB always felt ironic to me.

I did it in short bursts — waiting for coffee, in elevators, during CI runs. Two evenings later: 2,300 photos gone, 38 GB down to 11 GB, and I can actually find things in my library again.

What it doesn't do: no auto-categorization, no ML picking the "best shot" for you. You still look at every photo yourself. For something this small I think that's the right tradeoff, but if you want full automation, this isn't it.

Free on iOS 16+ / iPadOS / macOS (M1+): https://apps.apple.com/app/id6779493280

If you have a better cleanup workflow (or a swipe-fatigue horror story), I'm listening.