A boarding pass is only useful on the day of the flight.
informationalscreenshot2,497 days old
Safe to delete
AI Photo Janitor · Junk Photo Cleaner
The photo cleaner that reads what is in the photo.
Most photo cleaners sort by how a photo looks: duplicates, blurry shots, big files. This one reads what the photo was for, and works out whether that still holds. A boarding pass is useful for one day. A parking space for four hours. A receipt until the return window shuts. A recipe never expires.
Not on the App Store yet — the beta goes out in batches.
What review looks like
Two people at a restaurant table, plates halfway through a meal
personal4 years old
Keep
Recipes do not expire, so this one is your call.
informationalscreenshot812 days old
Worth a look
The first row is a real find from the library that was tested: a boarding pass with a useful life of 1 day, still sitting in the camera roll 2,497 days later.
How it decides
Describe the photo. Then ask two questions in order.
Every photo is described first, in words, including any text read out of a screenshot. Only then does anything get judged, and the judgement is made against that description rather than against the pixels. It is unglamorous work — reading, sorting, deciding one photo at a time — and doing it properly is the whole product.
First — is it sentimental?
A person, a view, a meal. Something that was worth looking at rather than worth knowing. Sentimental photos are never queued for deletion at any age. A photo of your kid is worth more every year, and no amount of clever scoring should be allowed to argue otherwise.
Then — has it gone stale?
A screen, a document, a label. Informational photos carry a fact, and facts have shelf lives. The app puts a clock on the kind of photo it is, compares that against how old this one actually is, and only then has an opinion.
| The photo | Useful for | Because |
|---|---|---|
| A parking-space photo | About four hours | You are back at the car by dinner. |
| A boarding pass | One day | The flight lands and the barcode is dead. |
| A receipt | Until the return window shuts | After that it is a picture of a piece of paper. |
| A recipe | Never expires | Informational, but still true next year. |
| A person, a view, a meal | Never expires | Sentimental. Never queued for deletion. |
Those shelf lives are the app's own judgement about the world, not measurements. They are the shape of its reasoning, and they are the thing you get to disagree with — which is why every verdict shows its argument instead of a score.
Measured on one real library
A camera roll is mostly not photographs.
9,641
photos in the library that was measured
39%
of it more than five years old
20.3%
of it screenshots, by Apple's own PHAsset flag
5%
of it duplicates — the thing every competitor competes on
Only 7% of it was taken in the last year. The rest is sediment: screenshots of things that mattered for an afternoon, documents photographed instead of filed, codes that expired in thirty seconds. Sorting that by date, by file size or by how blurry it is does not touch the actual problem.
On a randomized 50-photo sample from that library the engine judged 50% deletable, 42% keep and 8% worth a human look. Split by origin, 69% of screenshots were deletable against 41% of camera photos — screenshots are almost always informational, and information is the thing that goes off.
Straight about what that is: one randomized 50-photo sample, from one library of 9,641 photos. It is not a benchmark, not a promise about your camera roll, and a sample that size carries real error bars. It is the number that was actually measured, so it is the number on the page. Duplicates, meanwhile, were 5% — and Apple's Photos app has found those for free since iOS 16, under Albums then Utilities.
From the app
Screenshots, not mockups.
Every verdict shows its argument
Photos of leftover food are generally not useful after a short period. A screenshot of a website showing market data becomes outdated quickly. Each row leads with its reason, carries chips for what kind of photo it is, wears its age on the thumbnail, and waits for you to tick it.
Nothing is sent until you send it
Photos are grouped into categories first — tickets, screenshots, receipts — and you untick anything you would rather keep to yourself. Skip, and nothing leaves the phone. Nothing reaches the Review list until it has actually been assessed.
Questions
Including how to do it without the app.
How do I delete old screenshots on my iPhone?
By hand: open Photos, scroll to Media Types at the bottom of the Albums tab and pick Screenshots. iOS collects every screenshot there automatically. Tap Select, then drag across the grid to sweep up runs of them, and delete.
That album is the easy part. The hard part is that it is ordered by date rather than by whether a screenshot still means anything, so a receipt you still need sits three rows from a two-factor code that expired in thirty seconds. This app sorts that same album by whether the contents have gone stale, and shows you the sentence behind each call before anything moves.
How do I delete a lot of photos at once on an iPhone?
Manually, the trick most people never find: in Photos, tap Select, then put a finger on the first photo and drag across and down. iOS selects everything the drag passes over, which is far quicker than tapping one at a time, and turning the phone sideways puts more of the grid under the same drag.
Two things catch people out. The count in the corner is the only confirmation you get, so a fast drag can sweep up a row you meant to keep. And everything you delete lands in Recently Deleted and keeps taking up space for 30 days unless you open that album and empty it.
The reason bulk selection feels risky is that you are deciding from thumbnails, at speed, with no idea what most of them are. The app's list leads each row with a sentence about what the photo is and why it might be finished, so a long run of ticks is a run of arguments you agreed with rather than a run of guesses.
Can it find old receipts and expired boarding passes in my photos?
That is the case it was built for. The app reads what is in the photo, works out what kind of thing it is, and compares how long that kind of thing stays useful against how old this one actually is. A receipt matters until the return window shuts. A boarding pass matters on the day of the flight.
In the library that was tested it turned up a screenshot of an American Airlines boarding pass that was 2,497 days old. Nothing about the pixels was wrong with it. It had simply stopped meaning anything, about six years and ten months earlier.
Manually, search Photos for a word you know is in the image. Live Text indexes text inside screenshots, so "boarding pass" or a retailer name will surface some of them. It works, but only for the words you think to try.
How do I delete parking spot photos?
Manually, the only reliable route is scrolling back to roughly when you parked and deleting on sight, because a photo of a parking level looks like any other photo of concrete to a search index.
It is a good example of why age alone is a bad signal. A parking-space photo is useful for about four hours and worthless afterwards, while a photo of your kid taken the same afternoon is worth more every year. Both are the same age. Only one of them should ever be suggested for deletion.
Will deleting photos actually free up space on my iPhone?
Sometimes less than you would hope, and that is worth being straight about. If iCloud Photos is on with Optimize iPhone Storage, the copies held on the device are already downsized, so removing them frees a fraction of what the full-resolution originals would suggest.
Deleted photos also move to Recently Deleted and sit there for 30 days before the storage comes back, unless you empty that album yourself. And on plenty of phones the largest consumer is not the photo library at all, so check Settings, then General, then iPhone Storage before assuming.
Cleaning up a photo library is worth doing because a library you can find things in is worth more than a full one. Treat any space you get back as a bonus.
Can I search my photos by what is written in them?
Partly, already, for free: iOS Live Text reads text in your photos and screenshots, and the Photos search field will match some of it. Try that before you try anything else.
Because this app writes a description of every photo it analyses, including the text it reads out of screenshots, it can also search on things Photos tends to miss — the gist of an image rather than an exact string in it. It is a side effect of the analysis rather than a separate feature, which is why it is not the headline.
Does it find duplicates too?
It does, but it is not the pitch. Duplicates were 5% of the library that was tested. Apple's own Photos app has shipped duplicate detection since iOS 16, under Albums then Utilities, free and already on your phone.
Every other photo cleaner competes on that slice. The interesting question is the rest of the library.
Will it delete anything without asking me?
No. Nothing is removed until you review it and confirm. Every suggested deletion appears next to the photo with its reason in plain words, so you are agreeing with an argument rather than trusting a score.
When you do confirm, photos go to the standard iOS Recently Deleted album and stay recoverable there for 30 days. The app never bypasses that.
Is it on the App Store yet?
Not yet. It is pre-launch, and the beta is going out through TestFlight in batches. There is no App Store listing to link to, so this site does not pretend there is one.
The beta is going out in batches.
It is not on the App Store yet, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. If you want to be in an early batch, say so and you will be.
Ask for a TestFlight inviteNot on the App Store yet — the beta goes out in batches.