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I wanted a photo cleaner that still felt like the iPhone Photos app, so I built one
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I wanted a photo cleaner that still felt like the iPhone Photos app, so I built one A while ago I wanted to do something that felt very basic: see which photos and videos were actually taking up spa...
I wanted a photo cleaner that still felt like the iPhone Photos app, so I built one
A while ago I wanted to do something that felt very basic: see which photos and videos were actually taking up space on my iPhone.
I could see my library, albums, screenshots and duplicates, but I couldn't simply sort everything by file size.
And most photo cleaner apps I tried felt like separate utilities rather than something I would actually want to use to browse my library.
So I started building Slean.
It started with one simple feature
The first idea was just this:
Show the file size directly on each photo and let me sort the library from largest to smallest.
That alone changed how I cleaned up my phone.
Deleting a few large forgotten videos could save more space than going through hundreds of screenshots. Once the file sizes were visible, it became much easier to understand what was actually taking up storage.
From there, the app slowly grew around the same idea: make the existing photo library easier to understand and manage.
I wanted it to feel close to the native Photos app
This became one of the most important parts of the project.
A lot of cleaner apps feel like dashboards. You open them, see some storage numbers, run a scan and start deleting things.
I wanted Slean to feel much closer to the normal iPhone photo library.
Fast scrolling, familiar navigation, albums, full-screen viewing and a UI that doesn't make you feel like you are using a completely different tool just to manage your own photos.
The goal was not to build another app that says you have "12 GB of junk."
I wanted something I could comfortably browse my library with while deciding what to keep.
That also influenced the technical direction. I kept the iOS app native with Swift and SwiftUI, and the Android version native with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
Duplicates weren't actually the hardest problem
Exact duplicates are useful to find, but they were not the thing I ended up caring about most.
The more common situation was something like:
- five almost identical selfies
- several attempts at the same photo
- burst shots
- slightly different screenshots
- multiple photos of the same thing
Technically, these are different files.
From the user's perspective, though, they often belong together.
So I separated the two concepts in Slean:
Duplicates are copies of the same media.
Similar photos are different images that are visually close enough to review together.
I wrote a little more about that distinction here:
No uploads, no trackers, no ads
A photo cleaner gets access to one of the most personal parts of a phone.
Photos, screenshots, documents, family pictures, travel photos and plenty of things you probably never intended to upload anywhere.
Because of that, I decided early that Slean's core processing should stay on the device.
Sorting, duplicate detection, similar-photo detection, filtering and compression all run locally.
There is no account, no sign-in, no ads and no advertising SDKs.
Slean is free on iPhone, iPad and Android.
The app eventually became more than a cleaner
Once I was already spending time inside the photo library, I kept running into small things I wanted to do without jumping between apps.
So Slean gradually picked up more tools:
- sort the entire library by file size
- filter by screenshots, albums, dates, media type and size
- find duplicate and similar photos
- review everything full screen before deleting
- compress photos and videos with a size preview
- crop, rotate and resize
- create collages
- use Pixel Stretch effects
- see cleanup statistics
- browse "On This Day" photos
But I still try to keep the scope clear.
Slean only works with your photo library.
It doesn't claim to clean app caches, boost performance, improve battery life or remove mysterious system junk.
Where it is now
Slean is available on iPhone, iPad and Android, and I'm still actively working on it.
I also opened a small public GitHub repository with screenshots, platform details and links:
I'm still deciding which features deserve to be added and which ones would only make the app more bloated. Keeping the app simple while adding useful tools has probably been the hardest product decision so far.