Similar photo cleaner for iPhone.

The twenty-shot problem

Hold the shutter for a moment on a moving subject and you get a burst. Take three steps to the left and shoot again, and you get near-duplicates. Ask everyone to look at the camera twice, and you get two almost-identical family photos where one person blinked in each. Multiply that by a decade of holidays and you have the largest category of clutter in most libraries: photos that are not identical, and not different enough to keep both.

Deleting similar photos by hand is slow because you have to compare images carefully, and the difference is often invisible in a thumbnail grid. A similar-photo cleaner exists to make that comparison explicit: put the candidates side by side, score them, recommend one, and let you move on.

How TidyByte groups similar photos

Two signals are combined, and both run on your device.

1. Time proximity

   Photos taken within a short window of each other are candidates, because that is how people shoot: several attempts in a few seconds. A photo from last year will never be grouped with this year’s version of the same view, which keeps the groups meaningful.

2. Visual similarity

   Apple’s Vision framework reduces each image to a feature print, a numerical signature of what is in the frame. Signatures that sit close together describe the same scene, even when the file size, crop or exposure differs.

Groups are capped so a single bad match cannot drag hundreds of unrelated photos together, and a group is only offered when it has at least two members worth comparing. Nothing about this requires an internet connection.

Choosing the keeper, and why the app tells you why

Each frame in a group is scored on sharpness, exposure and resolution, and the highest scorer is recommended as the one to keep. The app states the reason in plain language — sharper, better exposed, higher resolution — rather than silently deciding for you.

That transparency matters for a simple reason: you know things the score does not. The slightly softer frame might be the only one where nobody has their eyes closed. One tap overrides the recommendation, and the frames you keep are remembered if you scan again later, so your decisions are never re-argued by the app.

When you confirm, only the non-keepers are deleted. The keeper stays exactly where it was, in the same album, with its date and location intact.

Where similar photos usually hide

• Holiday viewpoints. The same landscape photographed five times because the light kept changing.
• Group photos. Everyone lined up twice, then a third time because someone arrived late.
• Pets and children. Subjects that never hold still, shot in long runs of near-identical frames.
• Food and product shots. Deliberate retakes where only one was ever going to be posted.
• Screenshots of the same page. Slightly different crops of a document or receipt.

Start with the oldest years, where the volume is highest and your attachment is lowest. Most people find that two or three sessions of a few minutes each is enough to clear the bulk of it.