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.

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.

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 near-identical shots you actually wanted. Days view is also where retakes are most obvious, since they sit next to each other chronologically.

By place and collection — locations, albums, favourites

Review everything shot at one location, 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 geographically puts the near-duplicates side by side. 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
• Large files

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.

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 are likely out of focus, and photos where someone's eyes are 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.

Treat the results as a shortlist to review rather than a list to delete unseen. Detection is a judgement call, and a deliberately shallow-focus portrait can read as "blurry" to any algorithm.

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 & screenshots
• Food
• Pets
• Plants
• Vehicles
• Sunsets

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 grouping

Groups likely duplicates and near-identical shots together so you can compare them, keep the best, and clear the rest.

iOS has its own Duplicates album under Albums › Utilities, and it's genuinely useful — but it's looking for copies of the same image. It doesn't catch the four retakes you shot a second apart, the burst frames, or the edited version saved alongside the original. Those are different images, and they're the bulk of what's cluttering a real library.

Seeing a cluster together is what makes the decision easy. You don't need an absolute judgement about whether a photo is good — only a relative one about which of these five is best.

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 cleanup

Your existing albums are available as review sets, so you can tidy a collection that's grown unwieldy.

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.

Storage breakdown by category

Shows which categories are actually holding your space, so you can start where the weight is.

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.

Large Files mode

Surfaces your biggest individual items, regardless of type or date.

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 reports how many items you handled and roughly how much space you recovered.

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 goals and the progress ring

Set a daily target — fifty photos, a hundred, whatever fits — and track it with a goal ring.

A count is a better target than a duration. "Fifty photos" 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 "do today's fifty", which is a thing you can finish in a queue.

Streaks

Consecutive days of hitting your goal build a streak.

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.

Home screen widget

An optional widget showing your streak and a photo from your library as a prompt.

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. Nothing leaves the phone.

Session statistics

A running record of what you've reviewed, kept and deleted over time.

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. Statistics are stored locally and can be reset from Settings at any time.

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

Photo access is requested through Apple's standard prompt and can be changed or withdrawn at any time in iOS Settings.

Preferences, session statistics, streaks and album references are stored on your device using UserDefaults and a local App Group container. Deleting the app removes all of it. There's nothing held remotely to request or delete.