ClearSpace
User Guide
Find the photos actually eating your storage. Decide fast. Put the phone down.
The loop
Most photo cleaners hand you your library in the order you took it, which means you run out of patience wading through years of small, forgettable photos long before you reach the videos actually worth gigabytes. ClearSpace opens the other way round.
- Biggest first. The largest videos and photos lead the grid, each one labelled with roughly what it costs.
- Heart what you keep. Double-tap a photo, or tap its heart. Hearted photos leave the grid, so the pile only shrinks.
- Clear the rest. The bar at the bottom always shows what you haven't hearted, and what it's worth. Tap it when you're ready.
Keeping and un-keeping
- Double-tap keeps a photo. Double-tap again within a few seconds to take it back.
- Heart button, bottom-right of every tile, does exactly the same thing — whichever your thumb reaches for.
- Press and hold a tile for a larger look without leaving the grid. Videos and Live Photos play.
- Hide Hearted, on by default in the ☰ menu, is what makes biggest-first feel like progress: a photo leaves the grid the instant you decide on it. Turn it off to browse everything again, kept photos included.
A heart here is the same Favourite you already see in Apple Photos — there's only one, and it's shared both ways.
Narrowing what you see
The row along the top filters the grid, and each filter has its own colour — filled means it's the one currently active.
Everything — the whole scope, unfiltered.
Videos — every clip in the library.
Over 2 min — usually the fastest gigabytes going, long videos filmed once and never watched again.
Photos — stills only.
Screenshots — usually the easiest decision in the app.
Live — Live Photos.
Slo-mo — high-frame-rate video.
Favourites — everything you've hearted, unaffected by Hide Hearted.
Getting around
- Pinch to change how many photos fit across — from seven at once down to one filling the screen. It remembers where you left it.
- Drag the right edge to cross the whole library in one thumb movement, labelled with whatever you're sorting by.
- Sort, in the ☰ menu: biggest, newest, oldest, or longest first.
- Scope, also in the ☰ menu: narrow to a year, or browse a month at a time when the whole library feels like too much at once.
Working full screen
Tap any photo to fill the screen with it, then swipe sideways to move through the rest. Videos and Live Photos start playing on their own, with sound, whether or not your phone is on silent.
Three controls sit down the right-hand side:
- Heart — keeps the photo and, if it leaves the grid, moves you straight to the next one.
- Bookmark — opens the album menu for this one photo.
- Trash — deletes it and moves on. iOS asks you to confirm; that prompt belongs to Apple and no app can turn it off.
Swipe down to go back to the grid. If a photo is already filed in one of your albums, its name appears just above the buttons.
Albums
Clearing space isn't only about deleting. Press and hold any photo and choose Add to Album to file it into one of your existing Photos albums, or start a new one on the spot — useful for pulling the keepers out of a big batch before clearing the rest.
These are your real Photos albums, the same ones you'd see in Apple's app. A photo already in the album you choose is left alone rather than filed twice.
Working in batches
Tap Select for when you already know what has to go — a burst of near-identical shots, a month of screenshots.
- Tap a photo to add it to the selection.
- Drag sideways across a run of photos to select them all in one stroke. Dragging up or down still scrolls, as normal.
- Select All takes everything currently on screen — filtering first makes this precise rather than sweeping.
- Heart or Delete applies to the whole selection. Nothing disappears until you tap Done, so a batch stays put while you're still working on it.
What happens when you delete
Deleted photos go to Recently Deleted in Apple's Photos app, where they sit for 30 days. Nothing is destroyed, and you can get any of it back during that window.
Your storage doesn't go down until Recently Deleted is emptied. Until then, the photos still occupy the same space they always did. Open Photos → Albums → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All to finish the job and get the space back.
What's free, what's paid
Finding, sorting, filtering, hearting, filing into albums, and deleting photos one at a time are all free, with no limit — the app does the hard part first, on purpose.
Clearing many photos in a single action — the "delete everything without a heart" button, and deleting a multi-photo selection — is unlocked by a one-time purchase. No subscription, ever. If you've already bought it and it isn't unlocking on a new device, the offer screen has a Restore purchase button.
About the sizes
The figure on each photo, shown with a ~, is a close estimate worked out from the photo's own details — its dimensions, its length, and the format it was recorded in — rather than by opening the file. That's what makes sorting a huge library by size instant instead of a multi-minute wait. Treat it as reliable for comparing one photo against another, which is the decision you're actually making; don't expect it to match Apple's storage screen to the megabyte.
Privacy
ClearSpace reads your library on your device and nowhere else. No account, no analytics, no trackers, nothing uploaded. Full detail in the Privacy Policy.