PicBroom Guides
Updated: September 2026
Take five shots to get one good one — everyone does it. The problem is the other four never leave. They aren't "duplicates" in Apple's eyes (different files, slightly different pixels), so the built-in Duplicates album ignores them, and they quietly become the biggest space-waster in most libraries.
Modern cleaners compute a compact visual "fingerprint" of each photo (on iPhone, Apple ships this as the Vision framework's feature print) and measure how close two fingerprints are. Photos taken seconds apart with nearly the same fingerprint get grouped as one moment. A good cleaner then ranks the group — typically by sharpness — so you keep the crisp frame and drop the blurry ones.
That analysis can happen in two places: on your phone or on the app's servers. Server-side analysis means your whole camera roll is uploaded. Before installing any similar-photo cleaner, check its App Store privacy label — if "Photos or Videos" appears under data collected, assume upload. PicBroom runs everything on-device (label: "Data Not Collected"), which also means it works in airplane mode.
Open a burst moment in Photos, pick your keeper, select the rest and delete. It works — but at thousands of photos it's an afternoon, which is why swipe-based review exists: one decision per second, month by month, until the backlog is gone.