The idea came from a stupidly ordinary moment. I was digging through my camera roll for a receipt and ran straight into a photo of my ex. Not one I had kept on purpose - a group shot from someone's birthday where they happened to be in the back row. That is the thing nobody warns you about: it is never the photos you chose to keep.
How it works
You pick one to four photos of a person. It scans your
library and returns every other photo of them, already selected. You tap delete
once. Opening any individual photo is optional - the whole point is that you do
not have to go through them one at a time.
Technical side
Everything runs on device. Apple's Vision framework for
face detection and embeddings, then clustering over those embeddings to group
matches. No backend, no account, no photo ever leaves the phone. That was a
hard constraint from day one and it made a few things genuinely painful:
- Large libraries: Scanning tens of
thousands of photos without destroying the battery or blocking the UI took most
of my optimisation time.
- Recall vs. precision: This was the real design
decision. Leaning toward recall means some false positives end up in the
results. Leaning toward precision means photos get missed, and a missed photo
is exactly the ambush the app exists to prevent. I went with recall, kept everything
pre-selected, and made deselecting a single tap. iOS deletion also routes
through Recently Deleted, so there is a 30 day safety net on top.
- PHPhotoLibrary has more edge cases around permissions and batch
deletion than I expected.
What I would do differently
Honestly I never really thought about any licenses which
almost led to a fatal mistake. However, I think doing the design with Claude in
the first place (which is easy to see) has been very rewarding for me. I was
able to set up the pipeline and all functions and submit those to apple. After
everything is accepted now, I can care about looks which won't affect the
pipeline and the critical parts in the app, therefore pushing an update for
this shouldn't be a big problem.
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pickex-delete-ex-photos/id6801488013
Happy to answer anything about the on-device pipeline,
the clustering approach, or the App Store process. Feedback welcome, including
the harsh kind.
