CleenMain

As iPhone cameras have steadily improved over the past several years, it has become easier to use them as an everyday carry camera. But that comes with a drawback: users can also end up flooding their phone’s limited storage with images that they don’t need to keep. That can pose problems down the road for people who need to clear room for an update, or who run out of space to back up the images in their iCloud account.

Enter Cleen, a new app for the iPhone that lets users handle photo management with a simple gesture interface. It’s like Tinder for your photos: users select a group of images on their device, swipe up to favorite images they want to keep (and add them to the iPhone’s “Favorites” folder), swipe down on images they want to delete, and swipe right on images they want to deal with later.

delete-confirmOnce they’ve made their way through all the images, users then hit the delete button, and Cleen will ask to delete all of the images. Users have to confirm that they want to delete all of the pictures they’ve selected before any of them disappear, and users can swipe any image they want out of the trash heap before deleting.

The whole process is stupidly quick and wicked efficient. I’m able to breeze through a couple dozen photos in under a minute, and quickly clear up space on my phone. It’s so easy to flit through my photos with Cleen that I genuinely wished there was a way for me to link my massive Lightroom library with the app and go through my trove of RAW files in the same manner.

If there’s one frustration that I have with Cleen, it’s that the images the app shows are too small to pick out fine details, and there’s no way to expand them to see more. It’s possible for me to tell whether something is out of focus just from the app’s tiny preview, but other people may not find that as easy.

Update: As it turns out, it’s possible to zoom in on a photo by tapping and holding on it in the center stack. Users can then pan around the photo by moving their finger on the screen. It’s a good way to see minute details, though I’ve found that it can sometimes be difficult to see the entire image in one pan.

One word of warning for users of the iCloud Photo Library beta: Cleen will only work with photos that you’ve shot with the camera on your phone, and not any of the ones stored in Apple’s cloud, even if you’ve downloaded them onto your device. (Any photos deleted with Cleen will be deleted from the cloud library, however.) That may change when iCloud Photo Library leaves beta, though.

Overall, Cleen is one utility that I see keeping on my iPhone for as long as it continues to work. I take plenty of pictures with my phone’s camera, and this is a key app for keeping my storage in check.

Cleen is available for free on the App Store.

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