SwipeClean

A Tinder-style photo cleaner for iPhone. One photo fills the screen at a time: swipe left to bin it, swipe right to keep it. Nothing is actually deleted until you tap the red button in the bin and confirm iOS's own prompt — and even then everything lands in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

How it works

• Reads your library through PhotoKit. If you use iCloud Photos, your whole library is already synced to the phone; SwipeClean downloads full-resolution originals on demand, and deletions sync back to iCloud automatically.
• Wi-Fi only by default. iCloud originals aren't pulled over cellular unless you say so — per photo, or permanently from the ⋯ menu. Downloads show progress rather than looking frozen.
• Remembers every photo you've judged, so closing the app and coming back later picks up exactly where you left off (review-state.json in Application Support).
• Filters stack. Type (screenshots, videos, selfies, Live Photos, favourites), album, and month combine — "Screenshots from Sept 2024" is one filter. Counts are faceted, so picking Videos rewrites the month list to show video counts per month and hides months with none. Empty slices don't appear at all. The filter persists across launches, and "Start over" applies to just what's filtered.
• Biggest first. Sizes are measured once in the background and cached, so you can aim at the forty videos that outweigh four thousand photos.
• Swipe up to skip. Defers the ones you can't decide on to a pile that survives relaunch, instead of forcing a keep-or-bin call on every photo.
• Find duplicates. Groups bursts and repeat shots, pre-picks the biggest copy to keep, and sends the rest to the bin. Candidates are clustered by capture time first, so it never analyses your whole library.
• Videos play on the card, muted and looping, rather than sitting frozen.
• A receipt after each delete, plus session and all-time totals under "Your progress" — otherwise the reclaimed space never shows up anywhere.
• Photos you swipe left on pile up in a bin. You can review that grid and tap any photo to put it back before committing.
• Deleting is batched on purpose: one system confirmation for the whole pile instead of one per photo.

Controls

Action	Gesture
Keep	Swipe right, or tap the green check
Bin	Swipe left, or tap the red trash
Undo last swipe	Tap the arrow between the buttons
See the whole photo (uncropped)	Tap the card
Review the bin / delete for real	Tap the red pill at the top right
Skip / decide later	Swipe up, or tap the grey arrow
Play or pause a video	Tap the card
Filter by type, album or month	Tap the filter icon at the top
Duplicates, progress, sort, cellular	Tap the ⋯ menu

Getting it onto your phone

1. Open SwipeClean.xcodeproj in Xcode.
2. The iOS 26.5 platform and simulator runtime are already installed on this Mac, so Xcode shouldn't ask for anything.
3. Select the SwipeClean target → Signing & Capabilities → set Team to your own Apple ID. (Xcode → Settings → Accounts to add it if it's not there.) Free Apple IDs work fine; the app just needs re-signing every 7 days.
4. If Xcode complains the bundle identifier is taken, change com.aadi.SwipeClean to something unique.
5. Plug in your iPhone, pick it from the device menu at the top, and press ⌘R.
6. First launch on the phone: Settings → General → VPN & Device Management → trust your developer certificate.
7. Grant Full Access when it asks for photos. Limited access only shows the handful of photos you picked, which defeats the point.

Notes

• Duplicate detection needs a real device: the iOS Simulator can't create the Vision feature extractor's context, and the app says so rather than claiming it found nothing.
• The size next to each photo and on the delete button is the real on-disk size, so you can see how much space a cleanup session actually frees.
• Requires iOS 17 or later.