What The Tech App of the Day: CleanMyPhone
BY JAMEY TUCKER, Consumer Tech Reporter
If you’ve ever pulled out your iPhone to take a photo or record a video only to see the dreaded message, “Storage Full,” you’re not alone.
For many of us, our smartphones have replaced dedicated cameras. We take pictures of vacations, birthdays, pets, recipes, receipts, and just about everything else. The problem is those photos and videos pile up quickly, making it difficult to find the pictures you actually want while eating up valuable storage space.
Deleting them manually isn’t much fun. Scrolling through thousands of photos one at a time can take hours.
That’s where CleanMy®Phone comes in.
What is CleanMy®Phone?
CleanMy®Phone is an iPhone app from MacPaw designed to help organize and clean up your photo library. Instead of forcing you to hunt for duplicate photos or blurry images yourself, the app scans your library and groups similar items together.
After a quick scan, you’ll see categories including:
● Duplicate photos
● Similar photos
● Blurry images
● Screenshots
● Screen recordings
● Large videos that are taking up the most storage
This makes it much easier to decide what can go.
It Doesn’t Delete Photos Automatically
One feature I appreciate is that the app doesn’t make decisions for you.
If you’ve taken six nearly identical pictures trying to get everyone smiling, CleanMy®Phone suggests which one appears to be the best and lets you review the rest before deleting anything. Nothing is removed unless you approve it. That gives you a chance to double-check before you accidentally lose a favorite picture.
More Than Just Deleting Photos
The app also offers a couple of useful storage-saving tools:
● Compress large videos while keeping good quality
● Convert Live Photos into standard still images, which can save additional storage if you rarely use the Live Photo feature. Those two options alone can free up several gigabytes on phones that have been in use for a few years.
Your Photos Stay on Your Phone
Privacy is always a concern when an app has access to your photo library.
According to MacPaw, CleanMy®Phone processes your library on the device rather than uploading your photos to company servers. And if you accidentally remove something, deleted images still go into Apple’s Recently Deleted album, giving you about 30 days to recover them.
Is It Worth It?
CleanMy®Phone isn’t free. The app costs about $20 per year, or you can subscribe for approximately $8 for one month if you simply want to do a one-time cleanup. If you only have a few hundred photos, you can probably organize everything yourself. But if your library has grown into the tens of thousands of photos and videos, spending a few dollars to reclaim storage and organize everything may be well worth it.
The Bottom Line
CleanMy®Phone won’t magically make your iPhone bigger, but it can make cleaning years of digital clutter much faster than doing it manually.
If you’re constantly running into storage warnings or you’ve been putting off cleaning your photo library because it seems overwhelming, this may be one of the easiest ways to get your storage
back.
