CleanMy®Phone: Storage Cleaner Reviews

by Auror3740

I downloaded CleanMy (with a free 3 day trial) and a different app called Remove Master (free but has some ads) because Lucie Fink mentioned them both in a recent video about decluttering our digital spaces. I like the concept of CleanMy, but I really REALLY strongly dislike how long it was taking to load my pictures. Every attempt to use it makes me wanna pull out my hair in frustration at the slowness. I noticed it mentioned the photos were “live” and I waited for one to load and checked and yup, they’re loading live which really slows this process down. Unlike Remove Master where I cleared out two months worth of unwanted pictures in literally just a couple of minutes (because they don’t load live there). I double checked to see if I could find a setting to make the photo not load live but I don’t see anything for that, and if it’s there it’s not intuitive. My recommendation is CleanMy make the picture load on default NOT live and allow the option to view live. But pay for this slowness? No way. Canceling immediately.

by Davidbwins

Just had something unacceptable happen. I was going through my “Similar Photos” and selected 31 photos for deletion. When I pressed “Delete 31 Similar” I received the Photos prompt asking me to confirm deletion of 261 photos. Each time I reattempted I got the same 261 even though only 31 were selected. I figured there was no way around the bug until it was fixed, and 261 seemed like a low enough number that I can check my recently deleted and recover what I wanted to keep so I just went on and deleted. When I checked my recently deleted, those 261 photos included my original selected 31, but also included 230 other memories that I might have lost forever if I wasn’t paying attention to the numbers (which I don’t always do since I like to trust CleanMy is working). This is unacceptable. Please fix this bug. In any view where I have selections made, it is not hard to confirm that the number set for deletion == the number selected.

by Greg-romans 12

When I first downloaded CleanMy it automatically tagged duplicate photos for deletion. And allowed you to just select “delete all duplicate” tagged/checked photos to be deleted.
When I chose that button it took me to the subscribe screen which I singed up for a one year subscription. but when I went back after subscribing for a year CleanMy no longer automatically checked duplicate photos. The only way to delete them was to look at each and every set of duplicate photos and manually check the box for the ones you wanted to delete. One set at a time! Which is extremely time consuming and something I wish to remain automated. They also say you can cancel your subscription anytime… So I canceled. However canceling just means they won’t renew your subscription at the end of its time. So I won’t get my $12 back but will have access to a useless app for a year.

by Amiyam12345

I subscribed to CleanMy (monthly charge) and have been (trying) to use it for several months and have had some issues with it. Lots of small glitches but still workable, if there was an issue I could usually find a workaround . I then ran into an issue that I couldn’t work around and needed help from support. I emailed and was told I would get a response within 48 hours. Didn’t happen. I emailed 2 more times over the course of the next two weeks asking for some kind of response so I know my issue has been seen and they are working on it. Nothing. After 2+ weeks I get an email with an apology and asking if I’m still having the same issue. Yes, yes I am. (If you had bothered to check my account before replying you would have known that). So they toss the ball back in my court and say I have 48 hours to respond before they “close the ticket”. Then, they close the ticket 24 hours later. I don’t check my email for a day (in remote area, no cell service) and I have an email response that they could have figured out themselves if they did 10 seconds of research, and an email closing the ticket that I inquired about multiple times for 2+ weeks. Such great customer service for an app I pay to use.

by Kendralovespearljam

I downloaded CleanMy for 3 specific reasons: 1. For the editing tools, like the option to blur the backgrounds of my photos. 2. For the “clean up albums & clear up space” feature. This automatic grouping feature is capable of automatically sorting through your albums and selecting things like blurry, low quality images that you can delete to clear up space. 3. Because it was SUPPOSED to be free. That’s why it gets 1 star — it was listed as a free app yet there wasn’t any of the features available unless you sign up for a monthly MINIMUM fee of $4.99. This means you download CleanMy thinking some of these cool tools are supposed to be free yet none are. It only starts you on a “free trial” that will charge you for CleanMy “renewal” automatically unless you catch it & cancel it. So basically useless as a “free app.” The fact that CleanMy was intentionally misleading is what makes me lose respect & made me totally u willing to pay for the services within CleanMy . I don’t like feeling scammed. I’m going 2 download a truly “free” app with similar features now. I also found snap seed, which I already found more useful (although it’s not got these exact features) but I’ll be hunting a non-misleading app to assist in clearing up photo space… or I’ll just manually go through & delete the duplicates, and accidental snaps that clutter my phone. That might be more time consuming but at least it’s free!

by Isa IC

I just spent almost two hours selecting duplicates, only for it to not delete them unless i paid $5 for this. I didn't want that time to have gone to waste, so I paid it. "It's ok, as long as it works, it'll be worth it!"

Well, in the end, CleanMy selected 300 OTHER photos that I hadnt selected at all to delete, and didnt allow me to review the selected photos. I deleted them, and went to check my recently deleted photos in my gallery, and not a single one of the photos i spent two hours selecting had been deleted. They were literally all random photos from last year or something. I tried deleting one single recent photo as a test, and then it said it had 180 photos selected (mind you, I deselected them before I did that, of course).

I'm infuriated. I paid $5 to become enraged. I'm never EVER paying for one of these apps without being verbally recommended again. I wish I could have my stupid $5 returned, just for the principle of it.

by Nai-De

1) CleanMy tries to delete what seem to be high-res originals and retain low-res copies.

2) There‘s no indication of RAW-JPG pairs, neither is it clear if it‘s going to delete RAW or JPG images while destroying the pair associations.

3) There is no way to inspect EXIF data, or file names, as Photos has somehow taken a bunch of files and duplicated them with some meaningless UUID as „name“, while the originals have the original file name as name. CleanMy makes no distinction and doesn‘t let the user select which file to delete based on meaningful information..
...etc. etc.

4) CleanMy doesn‘t even handle landscape mode, how exactly do they think any photographer worth his salt is going to use the iPad most of the time? Oh, like maybe with a MagicKeyboard or Keyboard Folio, but in any case mostly in landscape mode, because likely the vast majority of pictures is in landscape mode. But CleanMy insists on running in portrait mode... Really?

Do I need to go on?

Did I mention CleanMy is almost useless?

It‘s useful for the typical Apple DPU who has no clue what they are doing and wants to clean up a mess without caring about which images are deleted, etc.

Anyone who even comes close to using pictures in an advanced or even professional way: HANDS OFF until they have a major rewrite of CleanMy.

Did I mention CleanMy is almost useless?

And I was hoping someone would finally write an app like that which would actually be useful....

by Mar Z Attack

I have about 1.5k photos and I left CleanMy running over night and it still didn’t register all of them. It’s not just painfully slow, it’s murderously slow! When I gave up on waiting for it to “scan” all my photos I thought if I start interacting and deleting some more will come up. Photo previews take forever to load any other action takes even longer because of that. I can’t find any more details or instructions in CleanMy interface and I’m not going to bother googling for solutions because it’s ridiculous to use a browser to solve an app problem - apps are supposed to be out shortcuts!
Is this a trick of the free trial so that we can’t clean everything up before canceling? So if I let it roll over to pay it would all of the sudden work better? If that’s the case... good job on making a preview so bad it’s not even worth sticking around the full whole three day trial.
Seriously, I’m better off doing it manually.

by Blair West

I was really excited to find CleanMy! I have several of MacPaw’s apps, and I was needing something like this. But there is one glaring problem (kind of two). It doesn’t allow for you to either adjust how close you want it to match similar items, or doesn’t have an “exact” and “similar” difference. Sure it would be nice to remove similar photos, but what about just duplicates. I have no way to adjust that. I found one app eventually that I use now. It has a section for exact duplicate photos, then one for similar, and you can set how similar you want them to be before they show up on the list. I also felt like the “best photo” algorithm didn’t work too well. I saw too many poor photos being picked as the one to keep. It would try to get rid of the HDR photos, ones where people are actually looking at the camera (and try to keep the one where they aren’t) and even tried to say the same background, but different people were similar photos, and try to delete one of them. It turned out to be too risky to even try it, so I went with the other app.

by DaneFromKC

Photos of my life events and loved ones are important to me. Which is why I would prefer to only delete photos I’ve approved to be deleted. CleanMy actively fights my attempts to do so. By constantly scanning my large library of photos and selecting new photos to be deleted within a category I am constantly unable to hit the delete button in fear of accidentally deleting a once-in-lifetime moment without my knowledge or consent. Don’t get me wrong, the algorithms are great and sort out the garbage 90% of the time. But all too often does Gemini select a non-blurry photo or non-duplicate to deletion and if I wasn’t vigilant it would have thrown out a picture of the baby along with the picture of the bath water.

This could all easily be fixed with an option to never auto select photos but even after a couple years checking back in that feature doesn’t seem to exist.

by Misses Hippy

Love CleanMy! I had almost 5,000 duplicates on my devices. The time it saved me in sorting through all my cherished moments in life is priceless because now I have time to spend with my family and take more photos of them while making memories with them instead of sitting in front of my Mac going through the 2T of images I have!! You can’t put a price on spending time with those you love when in retrospect I would have never been given that extra time without an app like Gemini!! Thanks a million to the brilliant developers that created an app for shutterbugs like myself! You’re A #1 in my book! So, If you pull out your phone for just about every moment in your life and/or if your sick of your phone storage constantly off loading apps because your photos app is plum full and if you’ve ever gone to take a photo and you can’t because your storage on your iPhone is fifty mega bites from being completely full then you need this ap as bad as I did! Download it, you will NOT regret it and you can thank me later! 😉😉.

by Sarah F. T.

Sometimes as I’m going thru, it’ll start “refreshing” and scroll me back to the beginning of the folder/album. That can be frustrating and makes me put CleanMy down for a while.

However, it’s a great idea overall and pretty easy to comprehend. I’ve defeated thousands of photos/videos using CleanMy and have been able to postpone paying $10/month for cloud storage for about 6 months now. So, CleanMy has paid for itself.

My one “I really really really wish they had this” is like a daily sort. Like, where you can filter thru the pictures from that one day in you photo history and clean them out each day. Kind of like Time Hop, but only photos (not social media) and specifically to delete unneeded images. I’m very “maintain the streak” motivated and I think I would be more apt to regularly use CleanMy if that were the case. This is the primary reason I’m leaving a review. I never review apps.

by OldFogeyNY

I had over 8,000 photographs in my Photos library. I had been trying to manually clean out duplicates, but didn’t get very far. I now have closer to 6,000 after Gemini identified duplicates, blurred photos, and other potential “why’d I ever keep this” images.

Not quite perfect, Gemini too often identified a time series of photos as duplicates, especially the sunsets and tropical animals I shot while on vacation. But by showing the shots and a suggested keep/delete it still sped up the process greatly. Gemini does mark keep if I decide to keep more than one of the duplicates. It does not, however, do the same for screenshots or blurred which, increasingly, includes iPhone photos using portrait mode.

I still use Gemini after that initial cleaning. It is most useful following a photo session and before editing to identify which of the many photos are worth editing.

by Ericdalen

Gemini II does help speed up the de-dupe process considerably. I would recommend it if you have hundred or thousands of duplicates or triplicates like I had. 10,000 photos is now down to 5,000. Unfortunately, there are a few things about CleanMy that make me frown.

It doesn’t yet work on videos. Portrait mode only which is odd on the iPad. Asks for a review every time CleanMy is used. Every time. Shows instructions on how to add Siri Shortcuts every time CleanMy is used. Every time. Some photos are flagged as dupes when they’re wildly different - probably due to a similar file name or metadata.

Overall Gemini II does a good job for what it’s meant to do . . . with a few annoying head-scratching choices from the developer. I already bought CleanMy , stop with the pop-ups. Like many other apps, please just let me use it without “helpful” advice that gets in the way of me enjoying it.

by Ryan M

Really great but still not the best it could be.
CleanMy helps me manage my iCloud space and stay on a lower tier plan but still doesn’t make me fully comfortable to use for the following reasons:

• every time I open CleanMy it has to process everything all over again. Can’t you use a bg processing task to do this when my phone is charging or something?
• the little check marks endlessly confuse me. Am I keeping or deleting this photo?! Why not use a X or trash icon to give me more confidence with what this action does?
• Even delete duplicates is confusing. I have doubles of almost everything but I tried to select only one of each double because the design doesn’t make clear to me that the original will remain. Consider showing the “original” in the stack and greying it out to signify that it’ll stay there but I can’t delete it?
• sometimes duplicates shows what look like photos but are actually videos with TINY playback bars!! I almost deleted what looked like a ton of bad photos but were actual videos with bad thumbnails. This is a pretty big visual bug imo! Videos must be more visually distinct as such or they might get mistaken for photos and quickly, accidentally deleted.

by Smarter San Diegan

Downloaded CleanMy awhile ago then forgot about it. Going thru all my apps today to delete ones I wasn’t using & couldn't even remember what CleanMy was about. After reading the description decided to try it out. I have over 24K pics, videos etc on my phone! Aye yi -yi! I just haven’t taken time (ob) to delete ANY over the years although many are dupts, blurry etc. The task was too daunting! The only feature I’ve used so far on CleanMy is the one that shows all blurry pics-what’s nice is it allows you to de-select the ones you still want to keep. It instantly allowed me to delete all the blurry pics I didn’t want-that alone would have taken a LONG time-out of 24K it’s a relatively low number-300 but still! It breaks all photos into groups of duplicates, similar, blurry, videos, screen shots. Now, I love my doggo but really, do I NEED over 10K pics of him?? My next project with CleanMy is to attack my Dupts-that will almost be FUN! Looking forward to “spring-cleaning” my phone!! Thanks Gemini!!

by Jtjdt

CleanMy takes all your screenshots and organizes them now. This works well if you screenshot a lot of stuff from the same app. In this example, the Stocks app. Every screenshot of Stocks you’ve ever taken will be in one line and you’l be able to select/delete all of it with one single tap.

The other dope feature is Photo Radar. You open it periodically and it quickly shows you all your junk screenshots, dupes, and other stuff you probably don’t wanna keep around and quickly removes it from your device. It seems like the developers are determined to add new features and keep improving things. Please add the ability for iPad/Landscape/Keyboard/Trackpad support.

by M. Willis

I do a lot of iPhone photography and CleanMy really helps to remove duplicates that aren't sharp (also video). Additionally, it declutters my phone from all those random screenshots by sorting them all in one bundle so you don’t have to search for them throughout your pictures and can pick and choose which to keep or remove. Make no mistake, you have full control in deciding what stays or goes to trash, but CleanMy moves the process along at a faster pace by assisting and sorting everything for you. Photo cleanup is something I would imagine some might procrastinate on doing until your phone’s storage is full, but now it’s a quick and easy job! No more procrastinating!

by BlackEcho7

This is the first ever app review I’ve done - so that alone should tell you something. I ran out of iCloud storage so I started manually going through my photos (without CleanMy ) and got quickly overwhelmed. I searched CleanMy Store and found Gemini Photos - I downloaded it and started using. I was instantly shown similar photos, duplicates, screenshots, and more. CleanMy walks you through finding photos and showing you similar photos and recommends the best ones to keep and easily trash the other. Within just a few minutes I was deleting 100s of photos with ease! I bought the monthly subscription and am still deleting some photos but CleanMy makes it so easy and almost fun! Wonderful app!! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

by Lunagyrl

Time is money and this has saved me a lot of time I don’t have to spare. When you have a toddler, you want to capture their milestones and great memories without being told by your phone that there is no space. Taking time to delete all the less than perfect portions to make room for better ones (especially when you also have a business that takes up phone space is priceless). Not only can I take more pictures sooner to 1. Capture my son and 2. Take photographs of items to sell but I have the peace of mind that it didn’t take away my sleep time, and I’m not worried about accidentally deleting something I want to keep. CleanMy helped me get rid of the unneeded yet undeleted. Thank you! 👏

by Alstang1

It’s a great app that works fairly well. The problem is the deceptive sales and advertising on their home page. They clearly state that CleanMy is family share capable, but this is not the case. The only thing that is family share is the free 3 day trial. Why would anyone need to share a free trial if it’s already accessible without paying? The answer is luring and intentional deception. Do not support companies who use these un-honest and unethical sales techniques. They could get a lot more sales if they would be honest and fair. They could have gotten $11 a year from me, but they attempted to get $22 a year, so I canceled all of it. They keep saying it’s my fault, and they are right. I saw family share and assumed they were an honest company.

by Shuvi123456789

CleanMy misled me and other users by making it seem as though it would delete my photos. I understand that app developers need to make money, but just tell users what they are downloading and what the terms are—otherwise, what happens (e.g. in my experience) is that I spent a lot of time going through and individually tapping through my entire photo library in CleanMy only to find out AFTER that I needed a purchased subscription. Ultimately it’s just deceiving and unethical to treat consumers like this, we’re not stupid and don’t need to be tricked with psychological games into buying apps, just tell us what your terms are up front, treat us with dignity and we will use our money accordingly.

by Deanna Lee Torr

This seemed great at first, I was decluttering my 30k photos, except most of these were under the similar category. I can delete from clutter no problem, but for some reason in similar no matter how I try to select photos to delete it keeps telling me I have none to delete, even if I go through and select them all by hand!! Idk if anyone else has had this problem but it’s super frustrating and makes CleanMy useless. It worked at first but when I tried to delete a group of about 8K photos it would just show that it was loading for a long time, stop, and nothing would change.

by Jfer421

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I’m missing some huge concept or something, but I’ve already purchased the OSX version of Gemini and use it fairly frequently...so I guess I just don’t understand why I should buy a subscription or pay another $15 for an iOS app that does the same thing. I can just run the OSX Gemini on all my iOS photos after I’ve imported them. (Or I could even use the iCloud Photo Library and do that if I remember correctly.) It just seems like a waste to me. I like the idea of CleanMy and it would make the searching/deleting process a LITTLE bit easier, but not THAT much easier...just sayin’.

by Jonathan Saliba

I love the way comparing and deleting similar pictures works because you can easily pop back and forth to compare small differences in the photos in order to be sure you’re keeping the best version of the photo. I hate the way it works with photos not detected as duplicates. There’s no way to know if you’re deleting the only picture of someone or something that happened until you have already decided to save or delete it. You can’t see what’s before or after a photo until you decide what to do with that photo, which means the “other” feature is useless.

by Thelmerfud

I had trouble getting CleanMy to work. I had to delete CleanMy and the reinstall before it would run without crashing.

Photos that get selected as blurred never go away. You inspect them and they just sit there. You should be able to swipe them into an I don’t want to review them for blurred images again like you can for photos that end up in the other category.

It needs to have an exact duplicate search not just a similar search. Every one takes multiple shots and CleanMy requires you to review them all. I had a backup app that created 2 copies of thousand of pictures. My 30k photos are a huge nightmare to clean up.

by JacWinters

This is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I have TONS of photos and this has helped significantly to clean them up. However, it has not been able to delete anything for about a month. When I press “delete photos” after having gone through the ones I don’t want, it simply doesn’t. Sometimes it does try to delete the photos, but each time an error pops up saying something to the effect of “Sorry, we couldn’t delete photos at this time.” Now my iCloud storage is full because I haven’t deleted photos in a while and thought that the issue might blow over. But it’s still here!!

by Alex Perlei

A really well-crafted app, but the lack of landscape orientation on iPad is a dealbreaker for me. Ended up cancelling my subscription after a few months because sorting photos is something I prefer doing on an iPad over iPhone, and I can’t stand doing anything on my big iPad Pro in portrait orientation. If it doesn’t bother you, or you are going to use CleanMy on iPhone only, it’s best in class.

Update: v.1.1.3.3 claims to add landscape mode support, but it doesn’t seem to work. Will keep trying.

Update 2: still waiting for the promised iPad landscape support. Once/if it is added - will be insta-lifetime purchase for me.

Update 3: new year, new version of Gemini Photos, still no landscape iPad support. This has got to me one of the more bizarre omissions I’ve come across in an otherwise excellent app.

by Footework

CleanMy has helped me to only keep my best photos in my albums. It compares the photos that are similar to a specific shooting sequence, chooses the one from the set that it finds the least blurry, the most attractive photo that has the subject with the best lighting, etc. The one judged to be the best is presented. The photos with flaws are shown next to it with a red tint and a check mark in a cicle. I then compare them, choose the best one I like and trash the rest. If I’d like to keep one that is suggested for the trash, I deselect it, and it’s saved!
CleanMy has certainly helped me control the volume of photos on my phone, and has saved a lot of time.
I highly recommend CleanMy.

by Sober1128

I take and save so many photos and screen shots and I finally have an app that will save space.

I've never been able to do this before. Before I got CleanMy my photos were taking up so much space that I had to delete things until I went through them. Which I never wanted to do. Cuz who does?

Gemini MAKES THIS SO VERY EASY!! It selects similar photos. You can very efficiently and swiftly review similar photos and look at each one and save or mark for deletion.

I can't wait to finish going through all my photos and save space because I could only afford the 64G iPhone 10.

Also, it has a beautiful design but it doesn't get in the way, in fact, the design helps the apps simplicity.

Simple yet thorough. I love you can delete a bunch of photos you've gone through (in full detail of the photo if you tap on it.)

Great app. Amazing app that fills a need so many have.

To the devs: Thanks for making CleanMy!

by Mr. Shadetree

CleanMy has helped me to take the time to sort through my photos. A task I usually put off until later but later never seems to come. Now it only takes a few minutes to sort and organize and CleanMy does the sorting for me. I had a problem figuring out the one time payment option and support was immediately there helping me figure it out. 3 emails back and forth and problem solved. Excellent app and excellent customer support. Highly recommend.

by SGL

I like the idea of CleanMy but it still needs work. It missed so many duplicate images in my library and marked a ton of images as duplicates/similar even though they weren’t. It found some blurry images but I found a lot more manually scanning through my library myself. I hope this improves over time - the developer makes great apps, so I am confident they’ll get it right eventually.

Update: CleanMy has been updated, and it is really great! It’s user friendly, fast and very satisfying.

by Chumbake

Using the free three days then canceling Would’ve easily paid a value equal to 2-3 months of the subscription. But considering I won’t own anything in the end I’m just gonna use it quickly for 3 days and delete it. Which is a bummer for the developer cause they’ll get nothing from me instead of some money. It’s a great app and I’m loving what it does. I would’ve gladly paid for a full version. (Just not $15 for a full version. Sorry)

Still rating 5-stars cause the actual app is great. Easy to use. I recommend you try it out if you have a ton of photos like me.