OPINION: There are very few “free” apps that have genuinely helped me solve a problem, with nine out of ten preferring to trap me in an endless scroll or locking any useful features behind a paywall.
However, I recently installed a camera roll-cleaning app that helped me clear my unwanted photos without costing me a penny.
My iPhone camera roll has long been a minefield of concert videos, holiday snaps, outdated memes and screenshots of any product and place that even vaguely piques my interest on social media.
The Photos app was a messy storage unit for my brain until a couple of months back, forcing me to wade through countless Trainline screenshots and pictures of iced matchas whenever I needed to find a specific image. My iCloud capacity desperately needed upgrading, and I once used Snapchat as my main camera app for a year because my phone refused to save another photo.
Swipe left
Whether Mark Zuckerberg heard me complain about my lack of storage or took a quick glance at my iPhone settings when I accepted Instagram’s latest terms I don’t know, but at the start of 2025 I began receiving endless Instagram ads for Swipewipe, an app that invites you to swipe left and right on photos from your camera roll, deciding whether or not to keep them around as though they were potential Tinder matches.
My first reaction was the same as anyone’s – would this really be quicker than tapping the trash icon in the Photos app and pressing Delete Photo manually? However, after searching for the app and reading a few positive reviews, I decided to give it a go. At the very least, having the app on my home screen would remind me to go through the camera app at some point, I reasoned.
Once I downloaded the app and gave it all the permissions it needed to access a decade worth of photos and videos, it organised them into individual years and months. This made the process feel a lot more manageable as I resolved to get to the end of November 2024 in one sitting rather than clearing everything from 2015 to 2025.
The swiping method was also a game changer for me, allowing me to decide if I wanted to keep a photo with less overthinking and press undo in the rare instance that I did change my mind. At the end of each round, all of the pics I deemed unworthy of keeping were sent to the Recently Deleted folder in my Photos app, giving me a third chance to save them if I regretted my decision to bin one.
My Camera Roll cleared
In less than a week, I managed to delete more than 50GB of photos and videos from my iPhone, determined to delete as many photos as I could before the free trial was up. I swiped through the app on my lunch break, at the gym and before bed, motivated by how quickly the storage bar would drop with each round that passed
I placed “free” in inverted commas at the beginning of this op-ed because Swipewipe is a subscription-based app. However, I managed to free up 50GB of storage from my Photos app within the trial period and haven’t felt the need to pay to upgrade to the full version since my trial ended, with the free version doing the job just fine now that I swipe through my pictures more casually.
If you’re looking to spring clean your camera roll, I couldn’t recommend SwipeWipe more.
