SlashPhotos

Find the duplicates, blurry shots and huge videos filling your iPhone, clear or shrink them safely, then keep it clean with a 2-minute nightly swipe. All on-device.

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Inspiration

Every iPhone owner has seen "Storage Almost Full" at the worst moment. The usual fix is an hour of scrolling through thousands of photos, deleting one at a time, and a month later the phone is full again. Most cleaner apps also want your library on their servers, or pre-select photos you would never delete. We wanted a cleaner that is fast, private, never deletes without your say-so, and fixes the habit as well as the mess.

What it does

  • One scan, one number. SlashPhotos sorts the whole library on the phone and shows how much space you can get back, before you pay anything.
  • Finds the waste: exact duplicates, similar shots and bursts (with a suggested keeper you confirm), blurry photos (a two-pass check so soft-focus portraits are not flagged), old screenshots and screen recordings, short accidental clips, and large videos, biggest first.
  • Slash through your latest photos. A short nightly swipe deck of your newest photos. Swipe to keep, swipe or slash across the card to bin it. Two minutes a night keeps the camera roll under control, with a streak to keep you coming back.
  • Shrink instead of delete. Recompress photos to HEIC at the lowest quality that still passes a strict perceptual check (dates, location, HDR and Portrait depth kept), and convert 4K videos to 1080p. A 3-minute 4K60 clip drops from about 1.1 GB to about 200 MB. You play both before deciding.
  • Stops the mess coming back. It reads how you shoot and points out the settings filling your phone, like 4K at 60 fps, with the exact Settings path. A monthly report shows how much the library grew and how much you cleared.
  • Nothing goes without your say-so. Judgement calls are never pre-selected, everything is reviewed before deletion, and deleted items stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days.
  • Private by design. Scanning, hashing, blur detection and compression all run on the iPhone. Photos never leave the device.

How we built it

  • Native Swift 6 and SwiftUI for iOS 18+, with Liquid Glass on iOS 26.
  • A layered Swift package: Core (domain models), Heuristics (pure scoring, thresholds and deck composition, 90% test coverage), Imaging (perceptual hashing and blur detection with Core Image and Vision), Library (the only PhotoKit boundary: scan engine and deletion), Store (SwiftData) and Purchases.
  • AVFoundation for 4K to 1080p video conversion, ImageIO for HEIC recompression with a calibrated perceptual quality gate, Core Haptics for the slash.
  • RevenueCat powers every purchase: product loading, purchase, restore, the pro entitlement, billing-issue detection and win-back offer eligibility, all behind one PurchaseState observable so the SwiftUI views stay simple.
  • Localised into 28 App Store locales with String Catalogs, and a lint script that fails the push on any untranslated string.
  • App Store screenshots in every locale are captured by XCUITest on a seeded simulator and framed by a Python compositor, so they always match the real UI.

Challenges we ran into

  • Blur detection that respects portraits. A single sharpness score flags every bokeh, macro and motion shot. Stage one is Laplacian variance on a small thumbnail; stage two runs Vision face and saliency detection on the candidates and discards any photo whose face or subject is sharp.
  • Compressing without visible loss. Picking one HEIC quality either wastes space or damages some photos, so each photo is searched down to the lowest quality that still passes a perceptual check, with thresholds set by our own calibration script.
  • Swapping the purchase layer late. Moving from raw StoreKit 2 to RevenueCat touched entitlements, restores, Ask to Buy and win-back offers. Keeping the PurchaseState API stable meant the views barely changed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The slash gesture: a blade trail, a red "Slash" stamp and haptics that make clearing photos feel satisfying rather than like a chore.
  • Every figure that changes rolls its digits, and the shrink flow shows your photo developing like a print.
  • 28 languages at launch, with screenshots captured from the real app in each one.
  • It never deletes anything you did not confirm.

What we learned

Cleaning is a habit problem, not a one-off task. The nightly two-minute session and the prevention tips matter as much as the scan. We also learned that trust sells: showing the reclaimable number before the paywall, and never pre-selecting judgement calls, makes people comfortable paying.

What's next for SlashPhotos

  • A win-back offer for lapsed annual subscribers, with a "Come back to Pro" home screen quick action.
  • RevenueCat Experiments on paywall pricing and trial length.
  • Localised App Store screenshots for all 28 locales.

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