MacPaw’s latest app will clean your photo library [Awesome Apps]

CleanMyPhone is a new app that will tidy up your photo library. Developed by MacPaw, maker of CleanMyMac X, the new app can do a thorough scan of images on your iPhone to clear out years of screenshots, saved TikToks and unusably blurry shots. It’s a simple way to clean up photos on your iPhone.

It also uses artificial intelligence to sort your photos into handy categories. Plus, it makes it simple to periodically look at the last week or month of your photos to sort things into albums and stay organized. As a bonus, the app comes with an internet speed test — good for checking if your connection is solid enough to take an important video call.

The CleanMyPhone app is available today from the App Store, with a free three-day trial. An annual subscription costs $24.99.

Clean up and organize your photo library with the CleanMyPhone app [Review]

Immediately you’ll notice how beautifully designed the CleanMyPhone app is. Open the app and you’ll see a quick walkthrough of the main features, with gorgeous graphics on a colorfully animated background. Make sure you enable access to all photos — that’s essential for the core features to work.

Hit the Scan button to search through your photos for clutter to eliminate. The scan surfaces screenshots, blurry pictures, duplicates, screen recordings, TikTok videos and albums generated by apps.

Tap on any category to get a closer look at what the CleanMyPhone scan flagged. You can mark some of the items as Sensitive, if you like, so the app won’t ever remove them. (If you delete something accidentally, you have 30 days to recover it from the Recently Deleted folder in Photos.)

Once you’re finished, just tap the satisfying Clean button to clear your iPhone of duplicate photos and other clutter.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have gigabytes of screen recordings and screenshots that it surfaced. Many of these were for work (and have already been published in articles and archived elsewhere) and didn’t need to be in my library.

Personally, I don’t understand why it thinks Snapchats are clutter. All of these are pictures and videos I just happened to capture with Snapchat instead of the regular camera and saved to my library intentionally. But it’s easy to mark them as sensitive (or ignore the category entirely).

Keep yourself organized

One-time cleans are all well and good for cutting out cruft, but any parent can tell you that staying organized is arguably more important. Go to the Organize tab for a quick review of the last week or the last month of photos.

The CleanMyPhone app will sort your pictures into albums, using AI to put them into a few categories: Portraits, Travel, Pets, Food, Text, Other.

In each category, you can see Similars (groups of photos all taken in a batch, where you only need to keep the best few) and Unique photos (one-offs you may or may not need). Pick the photos you want to keep (and which you want to remove), then tap Finish.

You can keep coming back to this tab regularly to keep your library tidy. I think this kind of habit-making digital cleanliness could really tickle the right kind of person (like someone who compulsively clears their running apps).

But wait, there’s One More Thing™

The CleanMyPhone app also gives you a tool for testing your internet speed. To use it, just tap the Network tab at the bottom and then hit Test. I normally just go to fast.com, but this is certainly a more beautiful experience.

During CleanMyPhone’s speed test, numbers whizz by the top of your iPhone screen and a big glowing graph is drawn live. When it finishes, the app will tell you what your internet connection can handle. For instance, it can tell you whether your connection is good enough to handle live gaming or a video call, or whether you should just stick to audio.

I really love this interface. If the developers made a little Mac app of this same interface (it wouldn’t even need the photo library stuff) I would pay an irresponsible amount of money for it considering fast.com is free.

Where to get the CleanMyPhone app

Price: $24.99 per year with three-day trial
Download from: App Store

CleanMyPhone is a delightful utility that will bring a spark of joy to the otherwise tedious chore of sorting through thousands of photos. I can easily foresee MacPaw adding more different tools to CleanMyPhone over time, to match the Swiss army knife-utility that is CleanMyMac X.

More from MacPaw

MacPaw is a Ukranian software company that’s still holding strong during the Russian invasion. From its headquarters in Kyiv, featuring both a vintage Mac museum and bomb shelter presentation room, the company continues to push out innovative products for Apple platforms.

Soon, SetApp Mobile will launch (in beta) in the European Union as a new app marketplace for iPhone. This is a natural extension of the popular Mac software bundle, adapted for Apple’s new DMA rules.

And CleanMyMac X remains the best way to keep your Mac in tip-top shape. You can use MacPaw’s flagship Mac app to clear out malware and adware, scope out the giant hidden files filling up your disk, and keep an eye on the apps that are hogging all your memory.

★★★★☆