While I’m an avid macOS user, iOS doesn’t enthrall me as much as Android. I do go back to my iPhone sporadically to see if Apple has caught up in terms of functionality (spoiler alert: it hasn’t). One such lacking feature is decent picture management, but, thanks to Slean, the iPhone became way more usable to me.
Managing Photos in iOS Is a Nightmare
The Photos app offers dozens of ways to manage your phone’s pictures—just not ones that actually matter. It’s nice knowing how many photos you have of your pets, but what about doing something with these files?
To be fair, many Android phones lack advanced management from within their gallery apps. Also, you can manage files in iOS within the Files app. However, it can’t show your picture library, whereas Android file managers can do that easily.
If you want to get rid of large photos or videos, you’re out of luck. Want to automatically find and remove duplicates? No can do. Delete old screenshots? Good luck finding them among all your other image files. And that’s all considering Photos got a major upgrade in iOS 18, last year.
Slean: What Managing Pictures on iPhone Should Always Have Been
Slean allows you to sort your iPhone’s images by size, age, or type — it automatically detects screenshots, for example. You can also filter only pictures, only videos, or only files larger than a specific size. Lastly, there’s duplicate file detection, so you can get rid of repeated stuff that eats up your storage.
What if you don’t want to remove large files, but need to free up storage even so? Slean can also compress your photos and videos with different quality options so that you don’t have to delete anything. You can then choose whether to replace the original file or save a copy.
At first, photos and videos don’t seem to take up much space. That changes over time as we take photos and screenshots, record videos, download images or receive pictures in messages. The default Files and Photos apps in iOS are ill-prepared for this, but Slean can save your iPhone’s storage.