Show HN: AI Photo Cleaner iOS app (on-device processing) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AI Photo Cleaner iOS app (on-device processing)

3 pointsnicklewers6 comments

Hi HN,

I've recently published my first iOS app to the Appstore! Its a photo cleanup app which uses on-device Apple Vision models to cluster similar images together into groups, and then ranks each photo within each group.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/ai-photo-cleaner-sorter/id6754172...

How it works: The best photo from each group gets marked as "Saved" by default, however in the Review stage, you can select others from the group to save if you want or unselect the "Best" one and choose another one to keep. The general concept is "keep the best, remove the rest", and in theory if you agree with the clustering/scoring and didn't want to make any amendments, you could clean up 100's of photos (and MBs) with just a few taps.

Motivation: I'm one of those people who somehow builds up an insanely bloated camera roll - 15 photos of the same restaurant dish, 10 versions of the same sunset. So I initially built this for myself to help cleanup those 500 photos taken during a 1 week vacation... I've tried a load of the other apps out there, but most seem to have adopted a Tinder style process - swipe left, swipe right, which hardly decreases the workload. I wanted an opinionated way to do a mass cleanup easily.

Things on my roadmap: - Localisation for major languages - Improved background processing (so you can clean up 1,000+ photos without keeping the app open) - User preferences for how the photo scoring is calculated i.e. some people value emotional signals over image sharpness.

Its totally free to use (maybe one day I'll try and monetise it, if I'm ever fully satisfied )), I'd love any feedback - good and bad! (Especially would appreciate feedback on how well the grouping and scoring performs for you - any quirks?)

Thanks! Nick

OK, tried it on an iPhone SE 3rd generation (least powerful of new phones) and it works on 500 or so at a time. Quits at some unknown point between that and 4500.

Observations: the groups are somewhat redundant. I take a lot of snaps of Yosemite webams and WQXR screens in the middle of the night so I can remember the unusual piece I woke up and heard [0]. There are several groups of webcam photos, and in the group, none identical. Clouds make unique and similar (fascinating) patterns, especially when half dome's peak is above them.

I really don't care about duplicates. I can start clean any day, and some duplicates are just an annotated photo (meme) with the original lying around in case I get a better idea.

Here's the deal. Now and then, I copy the entire roll to the computer, so I could empty the phone any old day, but if I could capture those groups, the large ones, and perhaps tag or rename the photos, it would help me enormously to avoid the endless search for that ONE graphic I want to post RIGHT NOW. Apple image search is a terribly bad joke.

So this is the first free (almost) image characterization app I've seen, a hopeful sign.

Some days, I am tempted to rename every one of 6000 photos on the computer just so I can find the one I want.

Groups would help.

Thanks!

[0] In the boondocks, I like some music to mask weird sounds. One night, it was a group of foxes. I was using an iPad Air 2 to do this but it sprouted a bulge indicating possible battery explosion, so it is getting wiped and recycled. I took snaps on the phone, which was next to me (in silent mode).

Experiment stopped.

Interesting feedback, thanks for taking the time! I hadnt tried with over 500 honestly, mainly because it takes too long (until ive got good background processing in place so you can switch apps whiles its doing the work ), so thats a great observation.

I like the idea of annotating the photos within a group, updating the metadata so you could reference them easily in the future - I shall investigate. But yeah, everyones has a different relationship with their camera rolls, this initial app version is primarily focused on people who have duplicates/vacation photo cleanup/bloat etc todo, but I'll definitely look into other avenues of functionality it could offer.

Kudos on the launch.

This would be useful for somebody like me (254 GB out of 256 GB used!)

Would love to hear more about how the on-device AI model works... What is it? What does it look for ? how does it score? How does the user specify which are "similar photos to look at" ? etc etc .

Thanks

Thanks! So yeah its all on-device using Apples Vision framework. I use feature prints and embeddings + face counts + person counts + a few other properties to cluster similar photos, then score each one based on sharpness, exposure, face clarity, composition, emotional score, and Apple’s aesthetic score. Each of those is weighted a bit differently.

You don’t need to define “similar” yourself, you select i.e. 100 photos from your library, then it figures that out the groups by itself, and there’s the review screen so you can confirm the decisions made before deleting anything.

I wanted to try it out as I really need to clean up my camera roll, but it's not available in the UK :(

My bad, shared the US link! Here you go: https://apps.apple.com/app/ai-photo-cleaner-sorter/id6754172... Will update the post :)

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