Which iPhone photo cleaners are actually free?

Almost all of them say they're free. Most of them mean free to download. One stops you after a number of deletions it won't tell you before you install. One runs a video ad before it will let you delete. One finds your similar photos, shows them to you, and then asks for money before it will clear them. Here is what you can finish without paying, checked on the App Store on 15 September 2026.

By Bill DirkesChecked 15 September 2026How this was checked

I make one of these apps. Keepworthy is mine, so this is a comparison written by one of the parties in it. Every number below came off a public App Store page on one day and can be checked in a couple of minutes. Where an app beats mine, I've said so. The longer version of this disclosure is at the bottom.

Most of these are free until you try to finish.

The useful question isn't what an app charges. It's whether you can clean your library and be done without ever reaching for a card. Three apps here let you. The rest put something between you and the finish, and what separates them is whether you can see it before you install.

You can clean the whole library for nothing

No daily limit, no ad before a deletion, no countdown. Install it, finish the job, never pay.

Apple Photosfree, built into iOSDuplicates only, and it won't touch a burst of near-identical shots. But it's unlimited, it's already on your phone, and for some libraries it's enough.
KeepworthymineAll eight kinds of clutter, the best-shot ranking with its reasons, similar videos side by side, and compression. No daily limit, no cap on how much you clear, no account, no ads, no trial timer. Pro exists, at $19.99 once, and it's batch tools for large libraries. You can finish without it.
Photoscopefree, no in-app purchases at allThe cleanest answer on this list. There is nothing to buy, at any point. It needs iOS 26, it's photos only, and it doesn't rank for you, so the comparing stays your job.

There's a limit, and they tell you what it is

You'll hit a wall, but you can read where it is before you install. That's worth something.

LuminaClean65 deletions to start, then 10 more each day you come back. Published on the App Store listing and again on their own site, in those words.

There's a limit, and you meet it after you've started

These are the ones that cost you an evening. You scan, you sort, you commit to the work, and the wall arrives somewhere in the middle of it.

Clever CleanerA daily cap on how much data you can delete or compress. The number appears nowhere before you install, their terms say it can be changed from their servers without an app update, and the counter syncs through iCloud so reinstalling doesn't reset it. Swipe mode is genuinely uncapped. Most of their reviewers never mention hitting it.
CleanupA 7-day trial that converts automatically. On the free tier, reviewers through 2026 have repeatedly reported being held to about five deletions a day after selecting far more.
Cleaner GuruA reviewer in June 2026 put it plainly: “It identifies similar photos, which is great, but it won't let you delete them without paying, which defeats the whole purpose.”
SwipewipeSince about August 2026, video ads gate the delete action and there's a daily swipe cap. One September reviewer: “you have to watch multi-minute long video ads to go through more than 5 photos per day, and then another, even longer video if you want to actually delete the ones you tagged.”
Cleaner KitAds between actions, plus a rating prompt that interrupts the work. “every tap starts an ad, got frustrated left and deleted” (September 2026).
CulpixiPhone and MacFree to download, then a countdown. The Mac app shows “Free trial, 7 days left” in the corner and, when it runs out, “Your free trial has ended.” Then it's $7.99 once. Worth naming because it's otherwise one of the better apps here, it's a real Mac app rather than an iPhone app on a Mac, and it's easy to mistake for free.
CleansmithA 3-day trial, then $7.99 a week or $29.99 a year. Its App Store page lists ten in-app purchases all named “Premium Subscription” with no billing period on any of them, so the store page can't tell you what a year costs.
CleanMy®PhoneA 3-day trial, then $7.99 a month, $36.99 a year, or $34.99 once. No free tier to speak of.

Where a claim above comes from a reviewer rather than a listing, I've said so, because an app's own page never mentions these. The Clever Cleaner and Cleanup trial terms are from their published terms and listings. What each one charges if you do pay is a separate page, with the full price ladders.

Why this is the first thing on the page. Free-to-download is not free. Every app here would pass a checkbox that says "has a free tier," and the checkbox would tell you nothing about whether you can finish. That's the gap this section exists to close.

Every one of these will be wrong about a photo eventually.

Each app here will put a photo in front of you and suggest it should go, and sooner or later it will be wrong about one you wanted to keep. What the app does in that moment is the part you'll actually live with, and it's the part the App Store listings say least about.

Five things decide how bad that moment is, and you can check all of them in the first ten minutes of using any of these apps. None of them appears on an App Store listing.

Does it rank the group, or just crown one photo?

Almost every app here marks one photo as the best and leaves the other thirteen as an undifferentiated pile. That's fine until you disagree with the pick, which is the moment you actually need the app. Then you're back to comparing thirteen near-identical frames by eye, with nothing to go on. An app that puts the whole group in order gives you a second choice and a third without any work: disagree with the top one and the next-best is already sitting there. Keepworthy ranks every photo in the group best to worst. Of the apps on this page, one other comes close, and it gives you a number when you click a photo rather than an order.

Does it tell you why, in words?

A number is not a reason. Several apps will show you a score, which tells you the app is confident without telling you what it saw. The harshest review of one of the picker apps puts the cost of that exactly: it becomes a game of finding a million subtle differences. An app that writes eyes open, sharper, good exposure under its pick has given you something to agree or disagree with, and a note like blinking on the one below it has saved you from squinting at two faces. An app that just puts a star on one has given you homework.

How many taps to put two photos side by side?

You will want to compare two specific frames, and apps differ enormously here. The good version puts the pick next to its closest rival automatically, because that's the comparison you were always going to make. The tedious version makes you assign each photo to a comparison slot by hand before it will show them together, which is several deliberate actions every single time. Check this one in the first five minutes, because it's the thing you'll do most often and it's rarely mentioned on a listing.

Can you disagree in one tap, on the spot?

Check whether the flow lets you look at the whole group before anything moves, and whether changing its mind takes one action or requires backing out and starting again. A September 2026 reviewer of the most-recommended app in this category wrote that after an update, I want to be able to actually look through all the similar pics before moving them to the trash. The new swipe feature doesn't allow for that. That is a real person describing the exact failure this section is about.

Where does the photo actually go?

The answer you want is Recently Deleted in Apple Photos, where iOS keeps it for 30 days and you can get it back without asking anyone. Some apps keep their own trash instead, which means recovery depends on that app still working, still being installed, and you still having a subscription. Ask the same question about compression: does it write a new copy and leave your original alone, or does it replace the original with a smaller one?

This is the part of the category I built Keepworthy around, so treat the next paragraph as the pitch it is. Keepworthy ranks the whole group instead of naming a winner, writes the reason under the one it put first, and puts a short note on each frame it passed over: blinking, blurry, tilted, not sharp on the subject. Disagreeing swaps the pick in one tap. Nothing moves without your confirmation, everything you clear lands in Recently Deleted, and compression writes a copy and leaves the original exactly where it was.

What each one finds

Read off each app's own App Store description on 15 September 2026. A listing claim is not the same as a tested feature, and I have not installed all of these, so treat every cell as what the developer says their app does.

Capabilities as described by each app's own App Store listing, 15 September 2026. Apple Photos is included because it's free, built in, and where everyone should start.
App	Free tier with no daily limit	Groups near‑duplicates	Ranks every photo in the group	Names the flaw on the rest	Groups similar videos	Plays two videos side by side	Measures what compression changed	Mac app
Keepworthyfree, no limits	✓	✓	✓best to worst	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Apple Photosfree, built in	✓	×copies only	×	×	×	×	×no compression	✓
Clever Cleanercapped free · $39.99 once	◦swipe only	✓	×marks one best	×	×sorts by size	×	×	×
Cleanup$30–$623 a year	×	✓	×marks one best	×	◦“lookalike”, untested	×	×	×
Culpix7-day trial, $7.99 once	×trial countdown	✓	◦score on click	×explains the winner	×	×	×no compression	✓
Cleansmith$30–$415 a year	×3-day trial	✓	×	×	✓the only other one	×	×	×
CleanMy®Phone$35–$96 a year	×	✓	×	×	×	×	×	×
Photoscopefree, no purchases	✓	✓	×you compare	×	×	×	×no compression	×
Swipewipe$30–$519 a year	×ads, daily cap	✓	×	×	×	×	×	×
Slideboxladder unclear	×	×manual swipe	×	×	×	×	×no compression	×
Cleaner Kit$30–$363 a year	×ads between taps	✓	×	×	×	×	×	×
Cleaner Guru$40–$415 a year	×	✓	×marks one best	×	×	×	×	×

✓ the listing claims it ◦ partly, or with a condition × not claimed anywhere in the listing

Four columns need a caveat, and they all cut against me.

Ranking, and naming the flaw. These two columns are where I'd argue Keepworthy is genuinely different, so here is the strongest counterexample against me, examined properly. Culpix is a $7.99 one-time app from June 2026 with a real Mac app, and it explains its pick the way I'd have claimed only Keepworthy does: a row headed “Best-pick basis” with chips reading Sharp, Good exposure, Clear face, Eyes open. I installed it on a Mac to check rather than guessing from its listing.

What I found is a narrower difference than “we explain and they don't,” and it's the one the table now shows. Culpix explains the winner. The other photos in the group get a score, visible when you click one, described in its own interface as “This photo's score compared with the best.” So there's no order to read and no word attached to the ones it passed over. Keepworthy ranks the whole group top to bottom and writes what's wrong with each frame it demoted. In its 443 interface strings there is no occurrence of the word “why,” “reason” or “rank.”

Two other things I checked in the app rather than assuming. Putting two specific photos side by side means right-clicking each one to assign it to a comparison slot, which is several deliberate actions. And it does no video at all: no grouping, no comparison, no compression, and not one video-related string anywhere in its interface.

Groups similar videos. Cleansmith claims on-device analysis catching “similar photos and videos… cropped or edited shots, and videos saved in different quality or formats.” That's a real claim and I haven't tested it. Cleanup says it removes “large, lookalike videos,” and a listing can't tell you whether that's visual similarity or a size rule.

Measures what compression changed. Every app I checked describes compression with an adjective, most often “minimal quality loss.” Cleansmith's “up to 95%” is space saved, not quality kept. I looked through 324 apps on 15 September 2026 for any app reporting a measured figure for how much the picture changed and found none. That's the result of one person's search on one day, not a fact about the market, and I'd want to know if I missed one.

App by app

Apple Photos

Free · built into iOS · start here

Good at: Finding duplicates and merging them, free, since iOS 16. Search that no third-party app comes close to. New in iOS 27: star ratings and keywords, so you can mark and filter keepers by hand. And it already has your library.
Falls short: A burst of fourteen frames is fourteen separate photos to it, so near-identical shots stay put. It doesn't flag a blurry photo or touch your screenshot pile. On a big library the Duplicates album can take days to fill. Apple doesn't publish what it counts as a duplicate, so anyone telling you it catches only exact copies is guessing.

Run it before you install anything. Keepworthy vs Apple Photos →

Clever Cleaner

~82,000 ratings · 4.78 · $6.99/wk or $39.99 once

Good at: Duplicates and similar photos, on-device, with no ads, and swipe mode has no daily limit. Three years of goodwill behind it, and it's the app strangers recommend most often.
Falls short: Until 17 August 2026 it had no in-app purchases at all. It now has a daily data allowance on its free tools whose size is published nowhere and can be changed remotely. Its September reviews are full of people who were told it was free, and of long-time users unhappy with the redesign.

Still good, no longer what it was. The full story →

Cleanup

~716,000 ratings · 4.65 · $30–$623 a year

Good at: Breadth. Photos, email, contacts, a PIN vault, widgets. It has a review screen before deletion and its listing says nothing is removed without approval. It's the biggest app here by a wide margin.
Falls short: Nine simultaneous weekly prices from $5.95 to $11.99, alongside a $29.99 annual plan that costs about 5% as much over the same year. Its description claims compression “without losing quality” in one place and “with minimal quality loss” in another.

Check for the annual plan before accepting a weekly one. What it charges →

Photoscope

~139 ratings · 4.65 · free, no in-app purchases

Good at: One job, done carefully, for nothing. It finds photo series and walks you through them two at a time, champion against challenger, on-device and offline, with no purchases of any kind. It shipped a real update on 14 September 2026 after months of quiet, so it's being worked on. If choosing between similar shots is your whole problem, this is a genuine answer at $0.
Falls short: It now requires iOS 26, so an older iPhone is out. Photos only, with no video, no screenshots, no blurry-photo pass and no Mac app. And it doesn't rank for you or say anything about the shots, so the comparing is still your job. Its reviewers have asked for a way to mark a series reviewed since 2024.

The honest free answer if you only want picking.

Culpix

~1 rating · 7-day trial, then $7.99 once · iPhone and Mac

Good at: The most interesting small app in this category. A real Mac app, on-device with Apple Vision by its own description, and the only other one here that explains its pick in words: Sharp, Good exposure, Clear face, Eyes open. It writes 5 stars and a keyword back into Photos when you finish, which nothing else here does.
Falls short: The trial is a countdown and almost nobody has heard of it. Only the winner gets an explanation; the rest get a score you have to click for. Comparing two specific photos means assigning each to a slot by hand. And it does no video at all.

Worth a look if you only want photo culling on a Mac.

Swipewipe

~93,000 ratings · 4.69 · $30–$519 a year

Good at: A swipe flow people genuinely enjoyed, and a large, loyal base that grew fast through the first half of 2026.
Falls short: It's mid-pivot to advertising and it's going badly in public. Its recent reviews describe video ads gating the delete button and a daily cap on how many photos you can get through. Its App Store listing doesn't mention ads or subscription terms at all.

Check its recent reviews before installing.

CleanMy®Phone

~23,000 ratings · 4.59 · $35–$96 a year

Good at: MacPaw is an established company with a real reputation, and this is the most conventionally priced app here: $7.99 a month, $36.99 a year, or $34.99 once. No weekly tier, no nine-way price test.
Falls short: It needs iOS 17, it has no Mac app despite the name and the company, and six legacy Gemini Photos subscriptions are still sitting on its listing years after the rebrand. Its compression describes itself as “minimal quality loss” and shows you no number.

The safest-feeling option in the paid tier.

Slidebox

~16,500 ratings · 4.81 · ladder unclear

Good at: Sorting photos into albums by hand, quickly. It has the best star average on this page and years of people saying they paid once and were happy.
Falls short: Its listing shows two different lifetime prices, $29.99 and $49.99, and two different annual prices, and never states what its famous one-time unlock costs. It does no near-duplicate detection and its description doesn't mention video at all.

Good at album sorting. Confirm the price in the app.

Keepworthy

Mine · free, with no daily limits

Good at: Ranking a whole group and writing the reason under the pick, with a note on the frames it passed over. Near-duplicate videos played side by side on the same second. Compression that writes a copy and measures how much the picture changed. iPhone and Mac on one purchase.
Falls short: It's new, so it has none of the track record the apps above have. Photos and video only, with no email, contacts or system junk. Review progress doesn't sync between your iPhone and your Mac. And it doesn't know your taste: on 88 groups from my own library, graded blind, the shot I'd have chosen was its top pick 55% of the time and in its top three 91% of the time. One grader and one library, so treat that as a small test. What it gives you is a short list with the reasons attached.

What's free and what Pro adds →

There is also a long tail of apps with fewer than fifty ratings each, most of them a few months old, most of them claiming on-device analysis and a one-time price. Two or three new ones appear every week. I've left them off because a comparison should be about apps you might actually be choosing between.

Which one you should actually install

A comparison page where the author's own app wins every category is an advertisement. Here is where I'd honestly send you.

You've never tried anything and your library is a mess

Open Photos, go to Albums, scroll to Utilities, and run Duplicates. It's free, it's already there, and it may clear enough that you stop reading this page. Give it time on a big library.

You only want help choosing between similar shots, and you want to pay nothing

Photoscope, if you're on iOS 26. It has no in-app purchases of any kind, it's on-device, and it does that one job. Keepworthy's picking is free too, but I'm not going to pretend $0 with no purchases in the app isn't a clean answer.

You want to sort photos into albums, fast, by hand

Slidebox. That's what it's built for and it's been doing it for years. Confirm the price inside the app before you buy, because the listing shows several.

You want one app for photos, email, contacts and the rest

Keepworthy doesn't do any of that and won't. Cleanup or CleanMy®Phone cover that ground. If you go with Cleanup, find the $29.99 annual plan rather than taking the weekly default. One caution: iOS has no Recently Deleted for contacts, so a contact merge that goes wrong doesn't come back.

Your storage problem is videos

This is the one I'd argue for. Keepworthy groups near-duplicate videos, plays two of them lined up to the same second, and after compressing one it measures the copy against the original and shows the number. I haven't found another app that does the last part.

You've deleted something you wanted before, and you're wary now

Also Keepworthy, and that's the reason it exists. Every frame in a group is on screen, the pick carries its reason, the ones it passed over carry theirs, nothing moves without your confirmation, and everything lands in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

You have a Mac and want to do this on a real screen

None of the big apps above has a Mac app at all. Keepworthy does, on the same purchase. Two very small apps also pair, Tide & Keep and Culpix, if you'd rather try something with a handful of ratings than something with none. If the Mac is all you care about, PhotoSweeper at $14.99 and PowerPhotos at $39.95 are long-established and good. Check the pairing before you buy: PhotoSweeper's iPhone app is a separate product on its own subscription, so owning the Mac one gets you nothing on the phone.

How to check any of this yourself

This page is a snapshot from one day, written by an interested party. These are the checks I ran, and they take a few minutes each.

Find out what the free tier actually allows

This is the one nobody publishes, so look in two places the marketing copy doesn't reach. Open the app's linked terms of use and search for “limit”, “trial” and “lifetime”. Then sort its reviews by most recent and read one screen. A daily cap shows up in both places long before it shows up on the store page.

Then find the price, if there is one

On the listing, scroll to Information and open In-App Purchases. That list is the real price menu, not the copy above it. Multiply any weekly price by 52 before you agree to it, because $7.99 a week is $415 a year. Every ladder in the category is annualized here. Apple shows only the ten best sellers, so it's a floor, not a ceiling.

Read the terms, not the description

The App Store description is marketing. The linked terms of use are where the limits live. Search that page for “limit”, “trial” and “lifetime”. One app on this list discloses a remotely adjustable daily cap and an iCloud-synced usage counter there, and neither appears on the store page.

Sort the reviews by most recent

Star averages lag by months and are inflated by in-app rating prompts, which is why almost every app here sits above 4.4. Recent written reviews are where a monetization change or a bad redesign shows up first. Sort by recent and read one screen of them.

Check what it does before you pay, not after

Run a scan and stop at the point where it asks for money. If the results are behind the paywall, you're being asked to pay for a promise. The most common complaint in this whole category is spending an hour selecting photos and then being asked to pay to actually delete them.

Delete one photo and go look for it

Clear a single photo you don't care about, then open Photos and look in Recently Deleted, under Utilities. If it's there, the app is using the system's safety net and you have 30 days. If it isn't, find out where it went before you clear a thousand.

Sources, and who wrote this

Free-tier limits came from each app's published terms of use where they exist, its App Store description, and its recent US reviews. Almost none of these limits appear on the store page, so where a limit is known only from reviewers, this page says so. Prices and full ladders are on a separate page.
Ratings, versions and minimum iOS versions came from Apple's public lookup endpoint the same day. Apple's caches disagree by a few hundred ratings between calls, so every count on this page is rounded.
Capability claims are quoted or paraphrased from each app's own App Store description on the same day. I have not installed every app, and a listing claim is not a tested feature.
Culpix is the exception, and was examined directly, because it's the closest app to Keepworthy on the two columns I claim most for. Version 1.6.1 was installed and run on a Mac on 15 September 2026. The quoted interface text, the trial countdown, the comparison-slot behavior and the absence of any video capability come from the running app and its 443 interface strings, not from its listing.
Reviews came from Apple's public US review feed for each app, sorted most recent. Written reviews skew more negative than star averages, because the averages are carried by star-only ratings collected from in-app prompts. Both are shown here.
The archived Clever Cleaner listing is from the Internet Archive's capture of its US App Store page dated 2 August 2026.
iCloud+ prices are Apple's, from support.apple.com/en-us/108047, checked the same day.
Connor Tumbleson, “Predatory iOS Cleanup Applications” (January 2025) documented this category's pricing patterns before I did, and is worth reading.

Who wrote this. Bill Dirkes, of Dirkes Medical, PLLC. I'm the developer of Keepworthy, one of the apps compared here, which makes this a comparison written by one of the competitors. That's a real conflict and I'd rather name it than bury it.

What I've done to keep it usable anyway: every competitor figure is a public fact with a date on it, every capability claim is quoted from the app's own listing, each app gets credit for what it does well before anything else, star averages appear next to the worst reviews, and the section above sends you to four other apps by name. Keepworthy's own shortcomings are in its card with the rest of them.

What I haven't done: installed and tested every app. Several cells in the table are listing claims, marked as such. Where I couldn't verify something, the page says so instead of guessing, which is why two apps have no price on the chart.

Checked 15 September 2026. This category changes monthly, so if something here is out of date or wrong, [email protected] and I'll correct it and say that I did.

Keep reading

What they chargeEvery price ladder, annualized. One app spans $30 to $623 a year. vs Clever CleanerThe one people recommend most, and what changed in August. vs Apple PhotosWhat the built-in Duplicates album finds, and what it leaves.

Free to clean up, with no daily limits.

Keepworthy works alongside Apple Photos on iPhone and Mac. Nothing is deleted until you confirm it, and it tells you why it picked what it picked.

Coming soon to the App Store

Also on the Mac App Store