Every Tool for Cleaning Your Camera Roll

Four-direction swipe review

Photos appear as a full-screen card stack. Each direction is a decision, and the next photo is ready immediately. An orange Undo button reverses your last swipe.

Video playback and Live Photos in review

Videos play in place inside the card, and Live Photos animate, so you can judge a clip without opening it separately.

Video is the hardest thing to review in any photo app, because a still frame tells you almost nothing about whether the clip is usable. Playing it inline means you can decide on the spot instead of bailing out to Photos and losing your place.

Reviewed tracking

Solo.Swipe remembers which photos you've already made a decision about, so they don't reappear in later sessions.

Without this, every session would start by re-showing you the same thousand photos you already kept — which is exactly why manual cleanup in the Photos app never converges. Here, the pool of undecided photos only ever shrinks. If you leave mid-session, Solo.Swipe offers to pick up where you left off, and you can reset the reviewed list in Settings.

By time — days, months, years, recents

Work through a single day, a month, a year, or just the most recent photos.

Time is the best entry point for most people, because context makes decisions fast — you remember the event, so you know which of the six similar shots you actually wanted. Days view is also where retakes and burst leftovers are most obvious, since they sit next to each other chronologically. Recents covers the last three days, and an On This Day card on Home shows the same date in past years.

By place and collection — locations, albums, favourites

Review everything shot in one city, everything inside an existing album, or your favourites.

Location is underrated for trips: a holiday produces hundreds of variations of the same few views, and grouping them by place puts them side by side. Place names come from the coordinates already stored in each photo (converted to a city name by Apple's geocoding service); Solo.Swipe never asks for your current location. Album browsing is useful for tidying a collection that's grown messy since you made it.

By type — screenshots, selfies, videos, panoramas, RAW, bursts

Each file type gets its own set, so you can clear a whole class of clutter in one pass.

• Screenshots
• Selfies
• Videos
• Panoramas
• RAW photos
• Burst photos

Videos have their own filters: short clips (under 5 seconds), long videos (over 5 minutes), slow-mo, time-lapse, Cinematic, screen recordings, favorites, vertical or horizontal, and 4K or 1080p HD.

These are the fastest wins in any library. Screenshots need almost no thought — most were saved for a purpose that expired within days. Bursts store every captured frame, so keeping one from each group clears a lot of items quickly. RAW and panoramas are individually huge.

Random 20 and random date

A batch of twenty random photos, or a random date from your library's history. Random 20 can also be limited to photos only, videos only, favorites, selfies, screenshots, or photos that aren't in any album.

This exists for the days when choosing where to start is itself the obstacle. Twenty photos is two minutes, it's guaranteed finishable, and it keeps a streak alive without requiring a decision about strategy. Random date doubles as a way to rediscover things you'd forgotten were in there.

Quality detection — blurry photos and closed eyes

Surfaces photos that look soft or blurry, and photos where someone's eyes look closed.

These are the two categories iOS has no album for, and they're nearly impossible to find manually — blur is invisible at thumbnail size, and you can't scan for a blink in a grid. Having them pulled into a review list turns an unbounded scroll into a short, finishable set.

Blurry Photos lists up to 20 photos that look soft, blurriest first. It measures sharpness across the whole frame, so Portrait-mode shots, soft-background close-ups and smooth scenes such as sky or sea can be flagged too. Check those before you swipe them away.

Closed Eyes finds photos where someone's eyes look closed. It ignores small faces in the background and flags a photo when both eyes of a larger face look closed. It doesn't check whether a better retake exists, so before you swipe left, make sure it isn't the only photo of that moment.

Either way, the results are a shortlist to review, not a list to delete unseen. You still decide on every photo.

Content detection — documents, text, food, pets, plants, vehicles, sunsets

Groups photos by what's in them, so you can review a whole subject at once.

• Documents & receipts
• Text & notes
• Food & dining
• Pets (cats and dogs)
• Plants & nature
• Vehicles & cars
• Sunsets & sunrises

Documents and text are the practical ones: photographed receipts, forms, whiteboards, parking spaces and Wi-Fi passwords are almost all disposable within a week, and they accumulate silently. Food, pets, plants and sunsets are where people shoot the most duplicates without noticing — six photos of the same plate, forty of the same cat.

Duplicate pair finder

Finds photos that were saved twice — captured in the same second at the same pixel size — and shows each pair side by side.

For each pair, tap the photo you want to keep and the other is queued for deletion, choose Merge to keep the larger file, or Delete Both. Skip and Undo are always there. Random Duplicates gives you 20 random pairs when you only have a minute.

What it doesn't do: it matches exact copies only. It doesn't group similar-looking shots, retakes taken seconds apart, edited copies, or bursts of three or more frames. Those are different images; for them, browse By Day or Burst Photos, where they sit next to each other and a swipe each clears them fast.

iOS also has a Duplicates album in Photos (under Utilities). Solo.Swipe's version is about the review experience: full-screen pairs, a tap to keep, undo, and the same session as the rest of your clean-up.

Swipe-up album filing

Swipe up on any photo to add it to an album — existing or new — without leaving the review flow.

Cleaning and organizing are usually treated as two projects, which is why only the first ever happens. Merging them costs about two seconds per photo during a session you're already doing, and it means you finish with a library that's both smaller and navigable.

Keep the album structure flat and small. Systems with forty albums fail because filing becomes a decision; systems with six or eight durable buckets survive, because filing becomes a reflex.

Album browsing and clean-up

Your existing albums are available as review sets, and the Albums tab lets you rename albums, move photos between them, and delete albums in bulk.

Albums decay too: the trip album that accumulated fourteen versions of the same viewpoint, the project album with material from a finished job. Reviewing an album as a card stack is much faster than scrolling one in the Photos app.

When an album has to go, you choose what goes with it: the album and its photos, the album only (photos stay in your library), or the photos only (the album stays). Albums with nothing inside get their own Empty Albums list with Select All. Deleted photos still go to Recently Deleted for 30 days; deleted albums can't be restored.

Making a post from an album? The “Create a post with DUMP” card links to DUMP, a carousel and photo-dump app by the same developer, where you pick that album to build a carousel or collage.

Storage breakdown by category

Shows which categories are actually holding your space — photos, videos, screenshots, selfies, screen recordings and favorites — and offers to clean 20 from the biggest one.

Photo libraries are lopsided in a way that's counterintuitive. Deleting five thousand old photos can free less space than deleting forty videos. If your goal is a storage number going down, the breakdown tells you where to aim — and it's usually not where instinct points.

Type	Relative weight	Why
Video	Very large	Minutes of high-resolution footage can outweigh hundreds of photos.
RAW / ProRAW	Very large per file	Uncompressed capture is many times the size of a normal photo.
Burst sequences	Large in aggregate	Every frame is stored as a full-size image.
Panoramas	Large per file	Very high pixel counts.
Screenshots	Small each, large in number	Minor individually; thousands add up and hurt searchability most.

Large Files mode

Lists your 20 largest photos, your 20 largest videos, or the 20 largest of both.

Pro feature. Free users can unlock Large Files for the rest of the day by watching a short ad. Free vs Pro

The direct route to a storage problem. A dozen decisions here typically does more than a thousand elsewhere — a forgotten screen recording, a forty-minute video of a concert you've never rewatched, an export you saved twice.

Session recovery reporting

Each session summary shows what you freed, deleted, kept and reviewed, how long it took, and roughly how many new photos that space would hold.

Partly motivation, partly information — it tells you whether the category you just cleared was worth the time, which shapes where you go next. One caveat worth knowing: on iPhone, space isn't actually reclaimed until items leave the Recently Deleted album, which happens automatically after 30 days or immediately if you empty it yourself.

Daily space goal and the progress ring

Pick a daily storage target — 250 MB, 500 MB (the default), 1 GB, 2 GB, 3 GB or 5 GB — and watch the ring fill as you free space. Pass it and the ring keeps looping.

A concrete target beats a duration. "Free 500 MB" has a visible end you can see approaching; "ten minutes" is something you can quietly abandon at minute three. It also reframes the task from "clean my entire camera roll" — which is infinite and paralysing — to "today's 500 MB", which you can finish before the kettle boils.

Streaks and Streak Freezes

Review at least 10 photos a day to keep your streak going. It's separate from the space goal, so a quick day still counts.

Streak Freezes protect it on busy days: you can hold up to 3, they're used automatically, you can earn one by watching an ad, and Pro adds 2 a month. Twenty achievements mark milestones for space freed, photos reviewed and deleted, streak length and sessions.

Streaks aren't magic — they work because they make the invisible visible. The value isn't on the days you feel like cleaning; it's on the day you don't, when a number you'd rather not reset is enough to get you to do a two-minute batch.

Widgets on the Home Screen and Lock Screen

Four optional widgets (iOS 17 or later): Streak with Detective Raccoon, also on the Lock Screen; Daily Photo with a Shuffle button; Space Freed with your week of cleaning; and Quick Clean, which jumps straight into a mode.

The hardest part of any habit is remembering it exists. A widget on the home screen is a passive reminder that costs nothing and doesn't interrupt — no notification, no badge, just there when you unlock your phone.

Widget data is shared with the app through a local App Group container on your device; the widgets don't send anything anywhere.

Session statistics

A running record of what you've reviewed, kept and deleted, with a 7- or 30-day activity chart, a cleaning calendar and your best day.

Useful mostly as evidence that the small sessions add up — which is the thing that's hardest to believe when you're forty photos into a library of thirty thousand. Your statistics are stored on your device and can be reset from Settings at any time.

iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro

A universal app for iPhone and iPad (iOS or iPadOS 16 or later). It also runs as an iPad app on Macs with Apple M1 or later (macOS 13+) and on Apple Vision Pro.

Widgets need iOS 17 or later. The app speaks 11 languages — English, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish and Turkish — and you can switch language inside the app.

VoiceOver and larger text

On the swipe deck, Keep, Delete, Album and Skip are available as VoiceOver actions, so you don't need to perform a swipe gesture at all.

Version 4.2 improved VoiceOver support across the app and added support for larger text sizes (Dynamic Type). The App Store lists VoiceOver, Dark Interface and Differentiate Without Color Alone as supported. If something doesn't work well with your setup, email solostaseraofficial@gmail.com.

On-device processing

Your library is read through Apple's PhotoKit framework and analysed with Apple's Vision and Core Image frameworks, locally on your iPhone.

There is no Solo.Swipe photo server. Photos are never uploaded, copied off the device or shared with third parties — which matters most for the things people don't think about until they do: unpublished work, client deliverables, documents, photos of where you live.

There's also no account and no sign-up, so nothing is tied to an identity in the first place.

Confirmation before deletion, and a 30-day safety net

Nothing is deleted until you confirm at the end of a session, and deletion is carried out by iOS.

Marked photos are shown back to you before anything happens. When you confirm, the request goes to iOS, which runs its own confirmation and moves the items to Apple's Recently Deleted album — where they can be restored for 30 days.

This is what makes fast decisions reasonable. You can swipe on instinct precisely because being wrong costs a tap sometime in the next month.

Revocable access, local data

The app needs photo library access to work. You can limit it to selected photos or revoke it any time in iOS Settings.

Your photos and library data — preferences, session statistics, streaks and album references — stay on the device (UserDefaults and a local App Group container) and are removed when you delete the app. Usage statistics (kept up to 14 months) and crash reports (up to 90 days) are held by Google Firebase under a random installation ID, not your name, email or Apple Account. If you allow tracking, Google may also link them to your advertising identifier. You can turn this off in Settings › Privacy › Share Usage Data.