iPhone · iPad · Live on the App Store
A photo cleaner for iPhone and iPad that opens your library in the order that actually matters: biggest first. The 2.9 GB video you filmed once and never watched leads the grid — the 40 KB screenshot does not. Heart what you keep, and one button clears the rest. Native Swift and SwiftUI on Apple’s PhotoKit, running entirely on your device.
New in 1.3
On iPad, or an iPhone held sideways, tapping a photo opens it beside the grid instead of over it, so your place in the grid never moves. Swap the sides or hide the viewer from the toolbar. It works in Split View and Stage Manager, and on a sideways iPhone the controls move to the edge so photos get the full height.
The first ten decisions are the ten that matter.
Most photo cleaners hand your library back in the order you shot it. That means you spend your patience on years of small, forgettable photos long before you reach the handful of videos actually worth gigabytes — and most people quit somewhere in 2019 with nothing freed.
ClearSpace inverts it. The largest items lead, each tagged with roughly what it costs. The bar at the bottom always shows what you have not kept and what it is worth, so you can stop the moment you have found enough.
The largest videos and photos lead the grid, each labelled with roughly what it costs. Or tap the month header to split the library into finishable monthly cohorts instead.
Double-tap a photo, or tap its heart. Hearted photos leave the grid, so the pile you are working through only ever shrinks. That heart is the same Favourite you already have in Apple Photos — there is only one, and it syncs both ways.
One button sweeps everything in the current view that has no heart and is not filed in an album. It goes to Apple’s Recently Deleted, where you have 30 days to change your mind.
Every figure is shown with a ~ because it is derived from the asset’s own metadata — dimensions, duration, and the codec it was recorded in — rather than by reading the file. Codec is the part naive estimators miss: HEVC is roughly half the bitrate of H.264 at equal quality, and HEIC roughly half of JPEG, so a flat pixel coefficient over-counts stills and badly under-counts video. Getting that right is what makes sorting a 40,000-item library instant instead of a multi-minute wait.
Hearting in ClearSpace sets the same Favourite flag Apple Photos uses. Anything you had already favourited arrives here hearted, and anything you heart here shows up favourited in Photos. No parallel list to maintain, and nothing to lose if you delete the app.
Thumbnails come from PHCachingImageManager with a moving, asymmetric prefetch window — 26 rows ahead, 8 behind — that releases its trailing edge on the same tick it extends. Requests use .fastFormat, which returns once instead of twice per cell. The grid also never reaches the network: an iCloud-only asset draws a placeholder, and opening it deliberately is what earns the download.
An infinite library is why people give up. Tap the month header and the library splits into monthly cohorts with exact gigabyte breakdowns, so a review has an end you can actually reach. Success is closing the app, not staying in it.
Plenty of photos are worth keeping but not worth leaving loose. The bookmark control files a photo into your last-used Apple Photos album in one tap, or opens the album picker; photos already filed carry an album badge, and Hide Albumed narrows the grid to what has genuinely not been dealt with.
No account, no server, no analytics SDK of any kind — first- or third-party — and no ad framework. Everything happens through Apple’s PhotoKit on your device, which is also what the app’s privacy manifest declares to Apple on every build.
Native Swift 5.9 and SwiftUI, iOS 17 and later. Photo access entirely through Apple’s PhotoKit. Deletions route through iOS’s own Recently Deleted; nothing is hard-deleted, deliberately.
The photo-auditing core lives in Packages/UnliDiskPhotos, a Swift package shared with the Mac app — one indexer, one size estimator, one album model.
Free to find, sort, filter, heart, file and delete one at a time. Bulk clearing is a one-time $9.99 purchase — no subscription, ever.
1.3 — grid and photo side by side on iPad and sideways iPhone, photos stored in iCloud that open sharp straight away, videos that start without the wait, and a purchase screen that retries instead of failing silently.
Unli Disk is the Mac companion: a disk-space analyzer and photo library cleaner whose Photos tab runs on the exact same engine. Buying Unli Disk ($14.99 one-time) includes ClearSpace Pro.
Duplicate and blur detection ships in the Mac app, not in ClearSpace. It is on the roadmap for iOS; until it is here, nothing in the app claims otherwise.
Deleted photos sit in Recently Deleted for 30 days, and your storage does not drop until that folder is emptied — Photos → Albums → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All. This is the single most common support question, and it is working as designed.
Exact per-asset byte counts would need an undocumented PhotoKit value and a database round-trip per photo. Every figure is prefixed with ~ so the trade-off is visible rather than hidden.
The free tier is a complete, unlimited app for one-at-a-time work. Bulk clearing is the paid line, and it is a single payment rather than a subscription.