One Simple Step To Increase Your iPhone Storage by 67%, For Free.
Every day, people take about 2.5 billions photos. Sadly, 42% of them are probably trash, and even more sadly, people don’t know about it.
How do we know this? Thanks to our new app Cleen.
Cleen is an iPhone app (download) which helps you clean up your photo library. It was created by porting the #1 liked photo rating feature out of our first photo organizing iPad app: tapsBook to iPhone. Cleen offers a swipe based UI for you to quickly triage your iPhone photos based on a three tier rating system: Favorite, Keep, and Trash. After then, you can empty the trash and do more with your favorite photos.
Cleen was launched 7 days ago, and within its first week, 12K users have downloaded the app and rated over 1M iPhone photos, out of which 42% of these photos were marked as trash for deletion, 38% were marked as favorite, and the remaining 20% were marked as average (keeper).
Every day, most of us carry a phone with 42% trash in it without us knowing it.
You might ask: What is the big deal of having so much digital trash?
Let’s put this 42% in perspective. In an extreme case, when your 16GB iPhone is full due to 42% unwanted photos, that means 6.4GB iPhone storage you cannot use for the right purpose (including not being able to upgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 8). Here is what you can do however, (in the order of pain scale):
- Transfer photos to your PC manually, or use an app like CameraSync, however, nowadays how many of you still turn on computer at home?
- Subscribe to a Cloud storage, with the lowest Dropbox tier is $99/year, and the lowest iCloud tier is $48/year
- Upgrade to a new iPhone with bigger storage: a 32GB iPhone costs $100 more.
- Triage your photos using the iOS Photos app, this is the most painful option of all — that is why we have the issue in the first place.
The problem is very real, as according the recent survey of 1212 North American smartphone photographers aged 25–44 conducted by Suite48A, 74% of the respondents “almost never” or only “occasionally” sort through their photos to separate the better photos from the rest, and ironically, consumers long for the simpler days of film photography.
Because these trash photos are so overwhelming in our photo library, consequently, we are either too tired to spend time to do anything with the best photos, or even worse, we wouldn’t be able to locate our pictures when we want them: 1 in 5 people couldn’t find photos they took a year ago.
Fortunately, Cleen comes to the rescue, and to quote Patrick on his drawing and review at his RocketInk blog:
Well, now we can do it in the most easiest manner: meet Cleen and enjoy triaging with swipe gestures.
We will go through the technical details and evolution on how we built Cleen from ground up in a follow up article. Below is a screenshot showing the origin of Cleen app: the rating feature of our iPad app tapsBook, which features the exact same three-way rating system. The only thing new is the card UI inspired by the Tinder app.
In the first week since Cleen launched, we have received 77 reviews (avg 4.7/5) and are encouraged by the candid feedback Cleen users have made:
In 10 minutes, I’ve gone through ~500 pictures, favorited 27, skipped 75, and deleted the rest! The numbers don’t lie! — Tyler.2012 (US):
It turns this process into almost a game, making it so much more enjoyable than the default lengthy process built into apple’s photo app. — Reviewer_1: (USA)
A useful app that allows you to quickly and easily delete photos. Have released just in 5 minutes 1 GB (500 photos). — DominikGr (GER)
Some of you may say — “Nice, but I don’t have time for rating photos.” You are not alone, based on the Cleen usage data, we found that the peak usage of Cleen occurs at the commute hours. This shows the users’ preference for doing this kind of task is during their dull time, and this is exactly why we built this as a mobile app so that you can use it anytime.
It is never too late to get organized, once you have the habit of routinely cleaning up your digital trash using an app like Cleen, you will unleash the full potential of your iPhone, by removing those 42% of junk, you are effectively increasing your iPhone storage by 67%.
