What you already told Photos
Favourited, edited, cropped, filed in an album, shared. These outrank every algorithm in the app. If you touched a frame, it wins its group — and Keeper says that’s why.
← Bridge to Purpose
iPhone · iPad · Mac
Coming soon · in design
Keeper
Forty shots of the same sunset. Keep one, get the storage back.
“iPhone Storage Full” is never the screenshots you meant to keep — it’s the sixteen-frame burst you never culled, the screen recording from two years ago, and 4,000 receipts. Keeper finds all of it, picks the best frame out of every pile, and shows you exactly what it’s about to free before it frees anything.
Nothing leaves your device
No account, no subscription
Deletes are always reversible
KEEP
SET 041 · BURST
16 FRAMES · 1 SELECT · 198 MB
Where the gigabytes hide
Biggest win first, always. These are the numbers from a real six-year phone history — 48,000 photos, 214 GB, nothing unusual about it.
- Similar setsBursts, retries, “one more with everyone looking”61 GB
- Screen recordingsThe worst bytes-per-item in any library23 GB
- Long-tail videoNever favourited, never edited, never replayed18 GB
- Expired screenshotsReceipts, codes, maps, boarding passes9 GB
- Failed framesPocket shots, motion blur, lens-cap black6 GB
- Recently DeletedAlready “deleted”, still on the disk for 30 days5 GB
- Forwarded mediaMemes and forwards saved out of chat apps4 GB
- Exact duplicatesRe-downloads, AirDrop round-trips, re-saves3 GB
Nothing is double-counted. A blurred frame inside a burst is claimed by one pile only, so the total at the top is a number you can actually reach — not a sum of overlapping estimates.
What makes one frame the keeper
Spotting the near-identical pile is the easy half. Keeper picks the frame you would have picked — and tells you why in four words, not a score out of a hundred.
Whether it’s any good
Sharpness on the subject rather than the whole frame. Blown highlights and crushed shadows. Resolution and format. Faces in focus, eyes open, expression readable.
Whether it’s the best of these
Most people present, because the shot with everyone in it is usually why the burst exists. Widest framing when the rest are crops. Latest in the burst — the one you waited for.
When it’s a close call, Keeper says so. Two frames neck and neck means neither gets pre-ticked and you get the final word — a confident wrong answer costs more than an honest shrug.
Not “we don’t upload your photos” — it can’t
Every photo app promises this and you have no way to check any of them. Keeper’s version is built into the app, not written in a policy — and you can verify it yourself in about ninety seconds.
No network entitlement
The app ships without permission to open an outgoing connection. There is no socket. The entitlement list is printed in Settings so you can check it against the shipped binary yourself.
Nothing third-party inside
No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no remote config, no A/B framework — the four things that quietly turn a private app into a telemetry pipe.
Every comparison on your chip
Similarity, quality scoring, face detection and text recognition all run on the Neural Engine in your hand. No model downloads, no server-side inference.
The index stays in the sandbox
Hashes and thumbnails live in the app’s own container, readable only while the device is unlocked. Never in iCloud, never in a shared folder. One button wipes it.
Read-only until you press the button
Keeper holds read access for its whole working life. Write access is used exactly once per session — the deletion you confirmed, through the system’s own dialog.
Nothing to have an account with
No sign-in, no sync, no subscription. All fourteen App Store privacy categories answered “Data Not Collected”, because there is nothing to collect it with.
Five rules the app isn’t allowed to break
Deleting the wrong photo isn’t like deleting the wrong file. So the safety net is the product, not the small print underneath it.
- Never destroysEverything routes to Recently Deleted, through the system’s own confirmation
- Never pre-ticks the final stepEmptying Recently Deleted always starts unticked
- Your signals are untouchableFavourited, edited, shared or filed is never suggested — and it says which
- Every set keeps a frameEnforced in the model, not the screen. A set can’t reach zero keepers
- Optional escrowExport full-resolution originals to a disk before a big clear-out
- One receipt, one undoEvery session is itemised and reversible in a single tap
Two things it won’t pretend to know
Two things people always ask a cleanup app for. Neither one can be done honestly as asked — so here’s what Keeper does instead of guessing.
- “Photos you haven’t opened in three years”
- iOS keeps no record of you looking at a photo — no view count, no last-opened date. Any app claiming otherwise is guessing. Keeper measures something real instead: never favourited, never edited, never filed, never shared. It calls that untouched, and words it that way on screen rather than telling you what you did or didn’t look at.
- “People you haven’t photographed in months”
- That gap is sometimes a friend you’ve drifted from and sometimes a person who died. A cleanup app has no way to know which, and no business guessing. If this ships at all it ships switched off, it never phrases a person as an absence, and its only action is to thin duplicates — fewer copies of the same memory, never fewer memories.
Where it is now
In design, being built in the open. Each stage stands on its own, so there’s a real app in your hands at the end of the second one.
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Phase 1
Prove the engineIn design
A command-line spike over a real library: group the duplicates, time every stage, check it holds up at 48,000 photos on phone-class silicon.
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Phase 2
Version 1.0Planned
Similar sets, screen recordings, screenshots, exact duplicates, Recently Deleted. The confirm sheet, the receipt, undo. Mac with full keyboard culling.
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Phase 3
Judgement callsPlanned
Blurred and dark frames, long-tail video, forwarded media, the escrow export, and Apple Pencil strike-through on iPad.
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Phase 4
The risky onesExploring
Near-duplicate video, and learning from the times you overruled the pick — kept on device like everything else.
The whole thing, written down
Every category, every screen, the scoring model, the on-device pipeline, and an honest list of what might not work. Plus the design principles that came out of drawing it.
No mailing list. Sorry.
Asking for your email would be a strange way to open a page about not collecting your data. Keeper turns up here and on the App Store when it’s ready — that’s the whole plan.
Native, offline, and quiet about it
One Swift core shared across the three platforms, with the whole photo pipeline running on Apple’s own on-device frameworks.
Swift
SwiftUI
PhotoKit
Vision
Core ML
SwiftData
iOS 18+ · iPadOS 18+ · macOS 15+
No runtime dependencies