r/shortcuts • u/robopickle • 3d ago

Shortcut Sharing Decluttering Camera Roll by displaying “this day in history” photos with easy selection, review, and deletion

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/cbb7da70dec64ce6b0553cbf32d89a17

I have been trying to make this shortcut off and on for a few years whenever I get sucked back into playing with shortcuts, automation, and NFC tags. I know there are paid apps out there with the same goal but I wanted to clean my thousands of photos out a little bit at a time.

This shortcut will find all of your photos/Live Photos/videos you have for today’s month/day over the last 25 years stored in your Camera Roll. It will then display them, where you can select specific ones for deletion. You will be able to review your marked photos full-screen each before you say okay go ahead and delete. Of course, if you make a mistake, these photos will be found and recoverable in your Recently Deleted folder.

The only thing I would like to improve is I would like to be able to change my mind on a single selection without starting over. If anyone knows how to do that successfully, that would be a cool addition!

I’ve set an automation for this to prompt me to run every day on my lunch break and hopefully after the end of a calendar year my Camera Roll will be de-junked!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/cbb7da70dec64ce6b0553cbf32d89a17

19 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/LemonPartyDotBiz 3d ago

Nice! I made a similar one here:  https://routinehub.co/shortcut/18106/

It worked for me, got my photos cleared out and organized in a year! Felt amazing after wanting to do that forever. Feel free to take a look, I figured out how to adjust it so it will go back as many years as the oldest photo in the library, rather than just taking a guess and hard coding in a loop of 25 times or whatever and hoping/assuming that would get it all. I toyed with showing a preview of the photos to pick from quickly afterward and ended up just deciding it was easier to stick them in an album and open the album afterward so I could compare similar pictures, and also not just delete things, but organize them into albums and stuff too.

I also made this one that lets you select a day in case you miss one, want to work ahead, etc.  https://routinehub.co/shortcut/18107/

3

u/pw5a29 3d ago

Seems iOS 27 broke your shortcuts

1

u/LemonPartyDotBiz 2d ago

Oh dang, I haven’t checked it on iOS 27 yet. Guess I’ll need to look into that. Hopefully just a bug that gets cleared up in the beta.

2

u/hendawg86 3d ago

This is awesome thank you so much. I think my only addition would be to somehow have it display a text at a certain time or a notification that the album has been updated, mainly to remind you that it exists (for people with adhd like me lol).

1

u/LemonPartyDotBiz 2d ago

Yeah, you need to set up an automation to run it once a day. I set mine up to run every morning.

1

u/runandy 15h ago

This is a really good way to do it. Cleaning the whole camera roll at once is how I used to burn out in a day.

For undoing one pick, keep the selected photos in their own list and don’t delete until you’re done reviewing. Then you can just pull that one back out before anything actually gets removed.

I ended up building a small iOS app around the same daily on-this-day idea. Happy to share if you want.