Deleting images and videos from your overflowing camera roll is never fun. It’s time-consuming and, simply… boring. I used to think that too, until I found a weird app that lets me delete images in Tinder-like fashion.
Swipewipe fixes the biggest issue I have with deleting photos
I’m the type of person whose camera roll is always overflowing with random screenshots I think I’ll need someday, TikToks and memes, and just a whole lot of things I’ll never actually look at again. Out of the 256GB I have on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, 149.89GB is taken up by the Photos app.
The only reason why I avoid cleaning up my camera roll is because of how long it takes. In the Photos app, you can drag and select a bunch of images to delete at once, but whenever I do that, I almost always end up deleting something I actually wanted to keep.
So, my only option tends to be going through each photo one by one, and then deleting them Though this doesn’t take too long when you’re deleting a handful of images, it quickly turns into a never-ending process when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of images and videos.
So, I’m not exaggerating when I say that if there’s a fun way to delete and organize photos on an iPhone, I’m all in. A couple of days ago, I was winding down by watching TikToks when I came across a video of someone deleting images in an app with a Tinder-like swipe interface.
Of course, I was naturally curious and instantly looked up the app and downloaded it to see if it could actually make photo decluttering fun. Swipewipe, a free app that’s available on both the App Store and Google Play Store, is a photo-cleaner app that lets you delete images by simply swiping.
So, how does Swipewipe actually work?
The way Swipewipe works is ridiculously simple. You just swipe left to delete a photo and swipe right to keep it. That’s pretty much it. As soon as you install the app and go through the onboarding stuff, you’ll need to grant it full access to your photo library so it can pull in all your images and videos.
Swipewipe sorts your images in a few different ways, including by month, by specific days, and albums like Recents, Random, and Duplicates. Additionally, you can also choose to sort through the albums you’ve already created in the Photos app, since those show up in Swipewipe too. This way, you’re not limited to its default categories and can clean up specific folders or collections you’ve organized yourself.
Once you’ve opened up your chosen album or category, all that’s left to do is swipe through your photos one by one. If you’ve accidentally swiped left on a photo you meant to keep, you don’t have to worry. There’s an undo button in the top-right corner of the screen that lets you quickly reverse the action.
The app does have a slight catch though: your images will only actually be deleted once you’ve finished going through an entire album or category. So if you swipe through a few photos and then close the app, those deletions won’t stick until you complete the whole batch. For example, when you’re done sorting through an entire month’s worth of photos, you’ll need to review them one last time before the app permanently deletes the ones you swiped left on.
The free version has some limits, but they’re not a dealbreaker
On the app’s free version, ads do pop up every five images, which some might find annoying. However, all you need to do is swipe left when an ad comes up to skip it, so you get used to it pretty quickly. When I’m using the app for too long, I do tend to get bored and tired, so I usually go through only a small batch of photos at a time, typically just a month.
On the App Store reviews, a lot of people tend to complain that the app’s free version is extremely limited. However, the developers don’t seem to mention any kind of set limit, and I’ve never really run into a point where the free version locked me out or forced me to upgrade. That said, if you’re someone who wants to clear out huge chunks of your camera roll in one go, you might feel those restrictions more than I do.
There’s not much to say about Swipewipe. It does exactly what it promises — nothing more, nothing less. If you’re tired of an overflowing camera roll and want a quick, no-nonsense way to clear up photos on an iPhoneor Android, this app gets the job done.
