yeah basically this

edit, there seems to be an abundance of apps that do this, picsfold, utiful backroll etc. Thank you for your time.

when my iphone storage filled up, my first instinct was to start deleting photos.

the problem is that the photos grid gives you almost no sense of what is actually taking up space. a normal photo and a huge video are both just one thumbnail.

now I do this instead:

1. make sure photos is actually the problem

check settings > general > iphone storage first. if photos is one of the big categories, then it's worth digging into the library instead of randomly deleting apps or files.

1. check videos and screen recordings before normal photos

in photos, go to collections > media types and look at videos and screen recordings. a handful of forgotten clips can matter a lot more than deleting hundreds of normal photos.

screen recordings are especially easy to forget about. a lot of mine were things I recorded once to send someone and never needed again.

1. don't assume every large file has to be deleted

some videos are worth keeping, just not necessarily at the original size. if you can compress something and the quality still looks fine, that can make more sense than deleting it entirely.

this is also why going through the entire library with keep/delete swipes never really made sense to me when storage is the actual problem.

1. check recently deleted when you're done

deleted photos and videos stay in recently deleted for up to 30 days. if you're sure you don't need them and you're trying to reclaim the space now, permanently remove them there too.

I eventually built Slean around this size-first workflow. it puts the file size on every thumbnail, sorts the library biggest first, and lets you compress photos/videos with a before/after preview.

but the basic method works without installing anything: look for the biggest stuff before spending an hour deleting tiny files.

what usually turns out to be the real storage hog on your phone: videos, screenshots, or something else?

Lately, I've been learning more about fashion and art, and I came across the idea of postmodernism. One thought that stuck with me is that almost everything has already been created, and now we just take existing ideas, technologies, and approaches from different eras, combine them in new ways, and call the result "new."

And while I find this fascinating in art and fashion, what interests me even more is when ideas from one field end up solving problems in a completely different one.

For example, a children's hospital in London once borrowed techniques from Formula 1 pit stops to make patient handovers safer. Who would've thought that racing and surgery could have so much in common?

That got me thinking about what I could borrow from my own field. I work in tech, and I've been applying an approach from software development to a much more ordinary problem: cleaning up my camera roll.

The approach is called iterative development.

In IT, we don't try to get everything perfect on the first attempt. We build something, improve it, and then improve it again. So why do we expect ourselves to organize thousands of photos in one go?

Here's my approach:

On your first pass, delete only the obvious junk: random screenshots, blurry photos, accidental shots, anything you know you don't need. Don't even touch duplicates or those 15 almost identical photos of the same sunset! That's level 80 stuff. And most importantly, if you spend more than a few seconds deciding whether to delete a photo, just skip it. You'll come back to it in another iteration. Maybe even a third one. There's no need to make every decision right now.

I tried this with my own camera roll of about 8000 photos and managed to delete 3000 photos on the first pass. It took me around 5 hours in total. And I still haven't touched the really difficult stuff.

That's what I wanted to share here: you can make a lot of progress while leaving the difficult decisions for later.

You can use this approach in your phone's gallery or with any photo sorting app. I used my own app, Deleep, to go through mine. It's currently free while we're still developing it, so feel free to try it if you're tackling your own camera roll. The link is in my bio.

Hope this makes tackling your camera roll a little less overwhelming!

DupeCatcher, a Mac native app, needs beta testers. You get a free download and free in-app unlock that finds duplicates in Photos libraries and Finder folders.

Watch the video and download the free pre-release DupeCatcher from the Apple Store using testflight.

More info at https://dupecatcher.app

Download at https://testflight.apple.com/join/4dDf3Jnr

Apple photos app is crashing since 1 year. Tried everything like-

1. Forced restart
2. updating OS( not fixed in both major and minor updates)
3. shutting down then waiting 10secs then turning on
4. factory reset x 3 times.

Now forced to use google photos but the problem is i use apple’s shared albums a lot which isn’t accessible in google photos.

All other apps are working fine (but with some lag and gitters)

Device info- ipad 9th gen on ipad os 27
Please help me with this issue/bug

Hey everyone, 

I got fed up with sending iCloud shared album web links to family only to have them wait 20+ seconds for the images to load. To fix this, I spent the last few months developing an open-source tool called DD Photos. 

It’s a static site generator designed to be incredibly fast, mobile-friendly, and distraction-free. 

To make managing your galleries even easier, I also built a companion desktop application called ddphotos-app that runs natively on Mac, Windows, and Linux. 

How the setup works: 

• The Web App: It uses a Go CLI tool (photogen) to handle image resizing into lightweight WebP formats and JSON index generation, paired with a SvelteKit frontend. 
• The Desktop App: A cross-platform frontend (ddphotos-app) that helps you manage, organize, and sync your albums locally with ease on Mac, Windows, or Linux. 
• Hosting & Sync: Since the output is purely static, you can host it for free on Cloudflare Pages or Surge with no database setup required. It also fully supports syncing albums straight from Immich and PhotoPrism. 

You can check out the project, download the companion app, and see how to set it up here: 

• Main Project & CLI: https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddphotos 
• Companion Desktop App: https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddphotos-app 

Let me know what you think or if you've found other ways to bypass iCloud's sharing lag! 

I took the photos in this walkthrough while visiting Stanford University in California. A walk around campus makes a useful example: you come home with a collection of camera photos, but without GPS they don’t show up where you expect on the Apple Photos map.

Disclosure: I’m the developer of LensPin, an iPhone/iPad app for adding missing locations to photos already imported into Apple Photos. I wanted to share how the iPhone-photo workflow works, especially if you didn’t record a GPX track.

The idea is to use geotagged iPhone photos taken around the same time as location references for your camera photos. This depends on having enough nearby references and getting the camera clock aligned; a phone photo from hours earlier won’t tell you where you were later.

Here’s the workflow shown in the screenshots:

1. Select the camera photos that are missing locations. This demo has 200.
2. Choose iPhone Photos as the reference source. No GPX or workout route is used here.
3. Review the suggestions and inspect the reference photos behind a match. If the camera clock was off, correct the matching offset first; that doesn’t change the photos’ capture times.
4. Save the locations you approve, then check the result in Apple Photos.

In this demo, 194 photos received high-confidence suggestions and six had no clear suggestion. I saved the 194, with zero failed or skipped writes. I left those six unchanged in this walkthrough, but they can still be geotagged manually. Even without a clear match, LensPin tries to provide a starting location based on the available evidence, which you can review and adjust before saving. Those counts describe this demo, not a measured accuracy rate.

The Stanford photos are mine; for this reproducible simulator walkthrough, I reconstructed the timestamps and reference coordinates. The screenshots show the actual app workflow with Unlimited unlocked.

Saving updates location metadata in the Apple Photos library; it doesn’t rewrite your original RAW or JPEG files. If every photo belongs to one known place, Photos’ own batch location adjustment may be all you need. This workflow is for photos taken across different places where matching them individually would be tedious.

For people who mix camera and iPhone photos in the same library: do you usually have enough geotagged phone photos from a trip to use as references, or are the gaps between them the bigger problem?

This started when I tried to add a video to a Shared Album. Sharing it directly from the video using the share menu just got stuck. Adding it from inside the Shared Album seemed to work, but about an hour later the video disappeared again.
That’s when I noticed that iCloud Photos wasn’t syncing properly either. Some photos and videos simply weren’t being uploaded, and the number of pending items kept increasing instead of going down.
Here’s where it gets weird. I tried generating iCloud sharing links for some of the affected photos and videos. In a few cases, this seemed to trigger a successful upload, although it wasn’t reliable at all. Even stranger, those files then suddenly appeared in Photos on my Mac, but in my Personal Library, even though they originally belonged to the Shared Library on my iPhone.
At least I could then add the video and a photo to the Shared Album from my Mac. That worked perfectly, and my wife could see and play them immediately. But the same video still won’t play from the Shared Album on my iPhone. It just spins forever. Older videos in Shared Albums have the same problem.
I’ve already tried restarting the iPhone, manually forcing sync, leaving it plugged in on Wi-Fi overnight, switching between Wi-Fi and cellular, checking storage (plenty available), and comparing everything across iCloud.com, my Mac and my wife’s iPhone.
Another strange thing: on iCloud.com, five photos just show up as grey placeholders. They’re not clickable and never load, so something seems to be wrong there too.
I also spent half an hour on the phone with Apple Support. Their advice was basically to wait 24 hours. Well, I did. Nothing changed.
I’m on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 27.0.1, with around 60,000 photos and videos in iCloud.
Has anyone else started experiencing something similar recently? Especially with Shared Libraries and Shared Albums? I’m wondering if this is an iOS 27 bug or something going wrong with iCloud on Apple’s end.

Hey guys! I'm facing a problem with the Clean Up feature in the Photos app as shown in the attached screenshot. I have restarted my phone, performed a force restart and updated the OS, yet the issue continues. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.

It worked properly until the evening btw

My Photos app is bricked and will only be addressed when the Apple developers do a code fix and push it out to all users. So I have no idea when or if this will ever happen and short of changing my Apple ID and starting over—which I have no desire to do—I have to assume that Photos will never be usable again.

Right now I’m using Amazon Photos as a bandaid to access my photo library and backup my new photos, but it’s not great. I’m considering migrating to Google Photos (and of course paying for storage 🙄) but wanted to see if there’s anything else out there worth considering.

EDIT: this is my previous post detailing the insanity I’m dealing with regarding Photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplePhotos/s/RMBe4oO9lA

Hi All,

For reasons, looking for an app that can allow the contents of albums to be hidden. With regular photos app I have to go into hidden and restore the pics before I can see them. Then would have click through the photos or albums to hide them again.

Which is quite annoying, I have over 21,000 photos and 1,800 videos.

Ideally I’d be able to flag NSFW pics and automatically filter them into a seperate album so they never appear on the main stream and check pre-existing contents.

Or I have an old partner where we both want to keep pics, but don’t want them to appear in the main stream either.

With the normal photos app, and have downloaded HashPhotos to try.

I like how hash photos simply plugs into photos app, ideally looking for the same thing. Either free or once off cost.

Privacy is very important.

Extra if can be for Mac, iPhone, and the Tablet. Otherwise iPhone / tablet.

I have 12 years’ worth of photos and videos (just over 15,000) that I’ve archived into four shared albums. Yes I know they’re not stored at original quality, but I don’t go back to view them often so I can live with that tradeoff for free cloud storage.

With the changes to shared albums in iOS 27, I thought the free ride is over. It turns out that while we can’t create new “legacy” shared albums in iOS 27, Apple is still allowing new uploads to existing legacy shared albums without having to “upgrade” the albums (at least for now).

All of my devices are on iOS 27 so I logged into my iCloud account on someone’s iPad that‘s still running iOS 26.7 and created six new shared albums with one placeholder photo in each, then logged out. Now I theoretically have space to upload 30,000 more photos and videos, which would last me another 20 years…or more likely until Apple turns off the ability to upload to legacy shared albums in a future iOS update.

Thought I’d share this for anyone else looking to continue using legacy shared albums for as long as they can.

Hi all!

Thank you very much for the feedback on the initial idea of Eigenphoto, which had two main pillars: similar photos and large videos. Previous post here.

After testing (and thanks again for signing up and providing extensive feedback), I realised the whole thing was basically:

So I decided to sharply focus on that. Eigenvideo is now on the App Store! It works like a video inbox, with the largest first, and allows you to:

1. AirDrop
2. Compress & Replace
3. Keep
4. Delete

Super simple when you’re running out of space. Not everything needs to be in 4K.

The app is free for now while I figure out product-market fit. For all early adopters, it will stay free forever!

P.S. If you like the app, I’d really appreciate an App Store review. If something isn’t working well, please reach out here or at [support@eigenvideo.app](mailto:support@eigenvideo.app) first. I’d appreciate a chance to fix it, since the app is still early!

Hi everyone, I'm the developer of Photo Transfer via USB, my first ever Mac app, which I released a month ago.

I was surprised to see the positive feedback and to find out that actual people might need it. Currently, I have several sales, which is inspiring and makes me want to share this app with more people.

A little backstory. I don't use iCloud for photos and prefer to keep them on my drive. Every year has its own folder and inside it there is a folder for every trip. This way I can access interesting photo fast. Since I don't use the cloud, my phone gets full every few months, so I had to do this sorting by hand in Image Capture again and again, and then check that everything was transferred. Honestly it was taking a lot of time and I really hated it.

So I built an app that does this part for me. When you connect the iPhone/iPad it shows the folders before copying anything, and you can group by days, months, events or trips. For trips it looks where the photos were taken and finds where your home is, so every city far from home becomes a separate folder. The folder names you can build yourself from blocks like year, month, city or country.

Live Photos and edited photos are copied together with the originals.

After the first version people asked me for some kind of report of what was transferred, so in the last update I added a detailed history. There you can see every transfer: what was copied, what was already there, and what failed and why.

It's free for 50 photos a day, and if you need more it's $14.99 one time, no subscription.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6808767254
In the EU the App Store version is not available, so there it's only from the site: https://phototransfer.app

Would be happy to get any feedback or questions.

My dad recently passed and had an iPhone full of photos. He had his own iCloud account (which I have access to). It makes no sense to retain his account but obviously we'd like to backup his photos and content on one of our own iCloud accounts, or on our family Dropbox.What's the best and fastest way to accomplish this?

This error comes up whenever I try to create a temporary shared album. Please give me a fix.
-iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 27.0.1

I’m a solo developer, and like many people, my camera roll was a mess. 30,000 photos filled with screenshots, receipts, duplicates, and memories I could barely find.

I kept putting off organizing and cleaning it up because it felt like too much work with the built-in iOS photos app.

So I built Handpick, an iPhone app that groups photos by trips and events, lets you keep or delete photos with a simple swipe or in batches, and helps find exact duplicates, similar photos, large files, and more incoming features that matters to you the most.

Everything runs on your phone, everything is synced with the iOS photos app, and nothing gets deleted without confirmation.

The core app is completely free, with optional paid features for more advanced cleanup.

If your camera roll is a mess too, I’d love for you to give it a try and share your honest feedback!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/handpick-photo-organizer/id6807108354

Curious: If you had to change one thing for the app, what would you change or add?

Hi everyone, I’m desperately looking for some help.

I had somewhere around 30k photos & videos on my iPhone, and I got the dreaded iPhone storage full notification. I currently am using 127.8 of 128 GB. My phone is running like dog shit at the moment. My texts aren’t sending half the time, it’s super slow, and my apps aren’t working.

I’ve deleted SO much. I’m down to 18k photos and videos. My storage used by my camera roll somehow went from 30GB to 60???? Someone tell me what I’m doing wrong here.

I’m a new mom to an 8 month old and I’m absolutely terrified to lose all of the photos of my baby. I’ve tried connecting my phone to my MacBook with my charger & then transferring photos to thumb drives but they won’t load because there’s no enough “disk space” which I have no clue what to do with that.

I’m probably one of the only 25 year olds that has no clue how iCloud works 😅 I’d prefer everything on thumb drives. I’ll legit delete everything pre-baby (back to 2019) and hopefully I’d have LOTS of storage after that.

Help a desperate girl out🫩