Your signals win outright
Favourited, edited, or filed in an album beats every other rule. If you touched a frame, it’s the winner — no exceptions, no scoring.
← Bridge to Purpose
iPhone · iPad — Mac to follow
Available now on the App Store
Margin
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 the duplicate files sitting in Desktop, Documents and Downloads. Margin 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. These are real screens from the shipping app.
Nothing leaves your device
No account, no subscription
Deletes are always reversible
Light and dark, straight from the App Store listing
See it before you free it
Real screens from the App Store listing — the same review-before-delete flow, the same numbers, no staged data.
See what's eating your storage
Compress instead of delete
Nothing lost, massive savings
Review before you commit
Dark mode, matched screen for screen. Every review flow — Similar Sets, Exact Duplicates, Compress — looks native in both appearances, not just re-tinted.
Watch Margin work
The full App Store preview — onboarding, the home screen, compression review, and the bulk-approve flow, back to back.
No narration needed: every screen in this clip is the actual UI, doing the actual thing its label says. If you'd rather try it yourself first, the App Store listing has the same clip plus the full screenshot set.
Where the gigabytes hide
Biggest win first, always. These five categories are shipped. The numbers below are from a real six-year, 48,000-photo, 214 GB library — 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 screenshotsSorted by the text in them before review9 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. Blurred and dark frames, forwarded media, and a few other categories are designed but not built yet — the technical design spec has the complete list and the order they’re landing in.
What makes one frame the winner
A short, deliberately simple tie-break — no black-box score to second-guess.
The larger file wins
Among untouched frames, Margin keeps the one with the larger byte size, then the higher pixel count as the tiebreaker — a cheap, honest proxy for “more information” with nothing to get subtly wrong.
Review before anything moves
The suggested winner is a starting point, not a decision — every set is a full contact sheet you can override before a single photo is touched.
Every set still keeps at least one frame — that part’s enforced in the model, not just the screen, so a set can’t reach zero winners no matter what you tap. The full scoring model and where it's headed next is in the technical design spec.
Or don’t delete it — shrink it
Long videos and large images over a size you set can be re-encoded in place instead of removed — picked one at a time or as a batch, queued and tracked from a compression tray.
Camera, date and location metadata survive compression exactly — nothing gets stripped to save the space.
Not “we don’t upload your photos” — it doesn’t
The similarity, hashing and clustering all run against Apple’s on-device frameworks — PhotoKit and Vision — with zero third-party dependencies in the shipped app. No sign-in, no sync, no subscription, nothing to have an account with.
The fuller privacy design — verifiable entitlements, sandboxed storage, an escrow export before a big clear-out — is written up in the technical design spec. Some of it is already true of the shipped app; some is still on the roadmap, and the spec says which is which. The short version, as a standalone policy, is here.
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 destroysPhotos route to Recently Deleted through Photos’ own delete request; files move to the Trash, not straight to disk
- Everything is restorableTrashed files can be put back with one tap, straight from Margin, until you empty the Trash yourself
- Your signals are untouchableFavourited, edited or filed in an album is never offered for deletion — and it says which
- Every set keeps a frameEnforced in the model, not the screen. A set can’t reach zero winners
A receipt screen after every clear-out is shipped. Not built yet: an escrow export before a big one — that's in the technical design spec.
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 is in the technical design spec. The reasoning behind the screens themselves — why deletion looks the way it does — is in the design principles.
Get it now
Free, no account, no subscription. Available today for iPhone and iPad — the Mac app, sharing the same engine, is next.