About Clear Gallery
The short version first, then every detail.
In one sentence
Clear Gallery is a free iPhone app that finds the photos you don’t need (near-identical shots, screenshots, documents and receipts, anything you describe in plain words, every photo of one person) and deletes them in bulk, using AI that runs entirely on the iPhone.
Key facts
- Platform
- iPhone, iOS 17 or later
- Price
- Free, with no subscription, no in-app purchases and no ads
- Account
- None needed
- App Store privacy label
- Data Not Collected
- Download size
- About 47 MB; the optional AI models add about 600 MB once, and person search about 6 MB
- Works offline
- Yes, after the one-time model download
- Language
- English (app and searches)
- Category and age rating
- Photo & Video, Utilities; rated 4+
- First released
- August 2026
- Latest version
- 1.2 (September 2026), which added duplicate photo detection
- Download
- Clear Gallery on the App Store
- Official accounts
- Instagram @clear.galleryy, X @gallerycleaner
What it finds
- Near-identical shots: bursts and retakes taken around the same time, grouped into sets so you keep one.
- Screenshots: every screenshot in one list, available the moment you open the app, with no AI download.
- Documents and receipts: photos of paperwork you needed once.
- Anything you describe: type “memes”, “food” or “blue t-shirt” and get matching photos.
- Look-alikes: pick one to three example photos and find others that look like them.
- One person: pick a face and gather every photo that person appears in.
Everything it finds starts selected for review. You deselect what to keep, confirm once, and the app shows how much storage you got back.
How the AI works
When you turn on the AI, Clear Gallery downloads a vision-language model based on Google’s SigLIP and runs it on your iPhone through Apple’s Core ML. The model turns each photo into a compact numeric summary of what it shows. A text search is turned into the same kind of summary, and the photos whose summaries match best come back. Near-identical shots are found by comparing these summaries for photos taken around the same time.
Person search uses two separate face models, RetinaFace to find faces and MobileFaceNet to recognise them, which also run on the iPhone. On a recent iPhone, indexing takes roughly 70 milliseconds per photo, so a library of about 3,000 photos is ready in a few minutes. Keep the app open while it runs; your progress is saved if you leave.
Privacy
Photos, searches and the index Clear Gallery builds never leave the iPhone. The app has no servers, no accounts, no analytics and no advertising. It goes online only to download its AI models, once, and only if you turn the AI features on. Read the full privacy policy.
What it doesn’t do
- It doesn’t upload, sync or back up your photos; it isn’t a cloud service.
- It doesn’t delete anything without your confirmation. Deletion goes through iOS, and deleted photos stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days.
- It groups near-identical photos taken around the same time. For exact copies saved at different times, the Photos app’s Duplicates album is the better tool (see Clear Gallery vs the iPhone Photos app).
- It matches what a photo looks like rather than reading the words in it; for text inside photos, use the Photos app’s Live Text search.
- It understands English descriptions only, and it is available for iPhone only.
Contact
Questions or feedback: everythingholding@gmail.com. More help is on the support page.