My phone has been on "Storage Almost Full" for like two years. I kept dismissing the notification, moving on with my life, and then getting hit with "cannot take photo" at the worst possible moment.

I finally got annoyed enough to do something about it.

The problem wasn't that I didn't want to clean my photos. It was that going through thousands of photos one by one is genuinely painful. You open the camera roll, scroll for 30 seconds, get nostalgic, close the app and do nothing.

So I built something that makes it stupid easy. It works like Tinder. Swipe left to delete, swipe right to keep. Blurry photos, duplicates, screenshots, giant videos. It finds them all and you just swipe through. My girlfriend cleared 4GB in one sitting and said it was actually fun which I'm counting as a win.

I shipped a rough version in December, hated how it looked, and spent the last few months rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. New design, faster scanning, better duplicate detection. Shipped v2.0 two days ago.

8 people have left 5 star reviews. MRR is basically zero. But the app works and I'm proud of it so here we are.

If your camera roll is an embarrassing disaster like mine was, give it a try. It's free.

If you're curious about my App: Photo Cleaner

I have a really bad habit of taking screenshots and never deleting them.

At some point my camera roll was just a mess. Random screenshots, duplicate photos, blurry pictures, videos I forgot existed, downloads from months ago. Every few weeks I’d open Photos, try to clean it up, get overwhelmed by the grid, delete like 12 things, then quit.

I wanted something that felt less like “organize your entire life” and more like just going through a stack one photo at a time.

So I built Photo Cleaner.

It’s basically a swipe flow for your camera roll. One photo at a time. Keep it or mark it for deletion. Then at the end you get a final review before anything is actually deleted, because I’m definitely the kind of person who would accidentally delete something important.

The app runs on-device, too. No account, no cloud upload, no sending your photos anywhere. That part mattered a lot to me because the idea of uploading my whole photo library to clean it feels weird.

I’m curious if other people deal with this the same way.

Do you actually keep your camera roll clean, or is it just thousands of screenshots and “I’ll deal with this later” photos?

Small numbers compared to a lot of posts here, but this is the first app I’ve built that strangers are actually using and paying for.

I’m a 23-year-old professional iOS engineer, and I built an iPhone app called Photo Cleaner.

It started from my own problem: my camera roll was a mess and my iPhone storage kept filling up.

Thousands of screenshots, duplicate photos, blurry shots, short videos, receipts, memes, random stuff I saved “just in case.”

Every time I tried cleaning it manually in Apple Photos, I would delete a few things, get overwhelmed, and quit.

The app scans for:

- duplicate / similar photos

- screenshots

- blurry photos

- large videos

Then users review everything in a swipe flow instead of bulk deleting. There is also a final review step before anything gets deleted.

Current numbers:

- 1.5k users

- $70 total revenue

- around 150 organic downloads/month

- no paid ads yet

The main lesson so far is that people do not really care about “photo cleanup” as a feature.

The pain is more specific: "My storage is full, but deleting photos feels risky.”

That sentence helped me understand the product better than any feature list. Still early, still tiny, but seeing people use something I built outside of work feels different.

Next thing I’m trying to figure out is distribution. Most users so far came from Reddit posts and App Store search.

For people who have grown small apps from the first 1k users: what growth channel worked best after the initial Reddit/App Store bump?

My iOS app is small, but it finally started getting some organic traction from App Store search.

Right now it is doing around 150 downloads/month organically, mostly from ASO. Nothing massive, but it is the first time one of my apps started getting installs without me posting every single day.

The biggest thing that helped was changing the app name.

The old name was something like PhotoRemoverPro.

It sounded like a brand, but nobody was searching for it.

So I changed it to something closer to what people actually type into the App Store:

Photo Cleaner - Free Storage

That alone did a lot of the heavy lifting.

A few ASO things that helped:

1. Use search intent in the name People are not searching for your brand name when your app is new. They are searching for the problem. For me that was things like photo cleaner, free storage, duplicate photos, clean camera roll.
2. Study competitors before writing metadata I used AI tools to look at competitor names, subtitles, screenshots, reviews, and repeated keywords. Not to copy them, but to understand what the market already teaches users to search for.
3. Make the screenshots explain the app instantly The app is a swipe-based photo cleaner, so the screenshots had to show the outcome fast: clean photos, delete duplicates, free up space, swipe to clean.
4. Use promo text like a real ad slot I ignored promo text at first. Now I treat it like another headline. It should explain the current version, the main benefit, or what changed.
5. Do not be too clever with the positioning I originally wanted the app to sound more premium and branded. The boring clear version performed better. People understand “Photo Cleaner - Free Storage” way faster than a clever name.

Revenue is still tiny, around $60 so far, but the fact that search is bringing in consistent installs is the part I care about most right now.

Main lesson: for early apps, clarity beats branding.

Curious what other small iOS devs have seen with ASO. Did changing your app name/subtitle move the needle for you?

My iPhone keeps yelling at me that storage is full, but every time I try to clean it I get stuck.

I’ve got thousands of photos, screenshots, short videos, duplicates, random stuff I might need later. Bulk delete feels risky, and doing it one by one is painfully slow, so I usually just give up and buy more iCloud storage.

I’m curious what actually works for people long term:

Do you clean your photos periodically or only when storage is full

Do you trust Apple’s built in recommendations

Do you use third party apps or just manual cleanup

Or do you just keep upgrading storage and ignore it

I ended up building a small on device app for myself that lets me review photos and videos one at a time so I don’t accidentally nuke anything. No accounts, no uploads, everything stays on the phone.

But honestly I’m more interested in how other people handle this. What’s actually worked for you without regret?

A friend and I rebuilt our iOS app from scratch after realizing the first version just wasn’t good enough.

The app is called Photo Cleaner. It helps clean up your camera roll by finding duplicates, similar photos, blurry shots, screenshots, and large videos. Then you review everything in a swipe flow instead of digging through the Photos app manually.

The first version worked, but it felt clunky. Slow review flow, messy UI, not something we were proud to promote.

So we rebuilt the whole thing.

Now it’s doing around $60 MRR, which is obviously tiny, but it feels like a real milestone after rebuilding from scratch.

What surprised me is that the problem is not very exciting, but it is very real. A lot of people just have camera rolls full of screenshots, duplicates, blurry photos, and random videos they keep putting off cleaning.

Still figuring out:

- how to build trust when asking for photo library access

- whether people come back after their first cleanup

- how to explain the app quickly without sounding like every other “cleaner” app

Curious how other indie hackers would position this. Would you lead with storage cleanup, duplicate photos, or messy camera roll?

iOS only for those curious:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-cleaner-free-storage/id6756098079

A friend and I rebuilt our first app from scratch with a very polished UI and almost 0 bugs in the final build during internal testing :) - 40 builds lated....

The app helps you clean up your camera roll faster by finding duplicate and similar photos, blurry shots, screenshots, and large videos.

Instead of making you scroll through thousands of photos manually, the app groups the stuff that is probably taking up space and lets you review it with a simple swipe flow. Swipe to keep what you want, swipe to delete what you do not.

We built it because both of our camera rolls were a mess. Screenshots we forgot about, 10 versions of the same picture, blurry photos, random videos taking up storage. Cleaning it inside the Photos app always felt slow enough that we would just put it off.

The new version is a full rebuild focused on making the app feel cleaner, faster, and less annoying to use. Would sincerely appreciate anyone trying it and letting us know what you think.

iOS only for now.

App Store: Photo Cleaner

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-cleaner-free-storage/id6756098079

Hey everyone,     

My friend and I built Photo Remover Pro a while back because our camera rolls had gotten completely out of control, and cleaning them manually was annoying enough that we kept putting it off.                           

First version shipped, people used it, but we knew it wasn't quite right. The core idea was there but the experience felt clunky.     

So we went back and rebuilt it. 

The biggest change is a swipe flow for going through your photos. Swipe to keep or delete, no menus, no friction. That one change made the whole thing feel way more usable. We also redesigned most of the UI, it's a lot cleaner and less overwhelming now. Still handles the usual stuff: duplicates, blurry photos, screenshots, large videos. But the whole experience of getting through them is faster now.

Main goal was to make "storage almost full" feel like a 5-minute problem instead of something you dread and put off. Would genuinely love feedback on the screenshots, the swipe UX, or anything else. Still actively building this.                                             

App Store: Photo Cleaner - Free Storage
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-cleaner-free-storage/id6756098079