Apple, I’m tired to pay for iCloud. Thats why I’ve paid 7000 USD to developer to create my own photo cleaning app.

I bought my first iPhone at 2008.
It was perfect shiny iPhone 3G in black color with 8GB of memory 🥰

Ohh… sweet times, when photos were just couple of kilobytes and camera was so great comparing to other phones, but still so bad to even read the text when you making a photo of a paper notes.

So many things changed since that time… and Apple, you made a great job, honestly. I love your products. I’m a big fan and super loyal customer of You.

But I’m tired to pay for iCloud. I’m on 1TB family tariff, just because of the amount of photos that are collected on my phone and phone of my dear wife.

And problem is not in the price, problem is what is this iCloud containing. It’s filled with tens of thousands of photos and videos.

But thats not really what I’m care about, as I can pay 10USD monthly without a word. The reason why I’m complaining is more long-term wise.

Look on it from this point of view.

I’m making around 10 thousand photos per year. A bit of travel, a lot of work and family photos. And I’m not the “worst”, because by statistics an average iPhone user makes 6K yearly.

My wife makes 15K+ of photos and videos. Because we have a small kid… because my wife is beautiful … because she has Instagram.

And mainly because almost each of us do many many similar shots to have a one great or at least good one 📸.

Problem is, that we don’t need those thousands of photos. We need hundreds per year, but best ones.
We need only 1 from 20. 1 from 10.
Not more.

Visualise long term perspective. Imagine that you would like to show to your son or daughter in 5 years some valuable memories that will happen today. If you are not a master of contextual search, it wouldn't be pleasant experience.

In 2018 I’ve started to get to the line, where amount of photos start to become a problem. I was trying to clean my camera roll manually…

• Going to the photos
• Tapping “Select” and then tap, tap, tap, tap, tap all the ones the I don’t need…
• BUT… suddenly you see the photo about which one you are not sure about… and you are telling yourself: “Ok… I need to see it”. You are tapping to open it and see that this is a good one and you would prefer to leave it…
• BUT “aggggrrrrrr” — the whole previous selection of hundreds of photos is canceled.
• You are starting again… tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…
• Process repeating. It was painfull. So I've dropped it.

For the same reason so many people do not cleaning their camera roll. It’s incredibly demanding on your nervous system.

And I'm qute sure that Apple has no intention to solve it. Because we pay for the iCloud GREAT money. $4.5 billion in 2020 exactly. It’s one of the most expensive cloud storages on the market.

So, I’ve started to look for options.

1. Get some seditatives and clean it with default Photos app.
   > Pros: Why not.
   > Cons. It’s just not feasible idea.
2. Stop to care about it and enjoy Memories function, which creates for you videos from random period of times.
   > Pros: Saves nervous system.
   > Cons: Not so much enjoyment from my memories. Those videos are half good. I’d prefer to use Quick or Beatleap for video making. Much more fun.
3. Mark photos as favourite
   > Pros: May work for someone.
   > Cons: Not good for me, because as Favourite I mark truly the best ones, the ones I would print.
4. Use third-party cleaning applications where AI “helping you to choose the best ones”.
   > Pros: May work for someone, but not for me.
   > Cons: For me it fails in terms of “what is right”. Problem of AI is that it can only recognise the quality of the photo. Not it’s relevancy to me. So basically, it doesn’t help at all, because I need to decide about each "quality" photo but with no relavancy in long-term. It's time wasting.

So I've tried to learn from the mentioned solutions/apps and fix what pisses me off.

Maybe you are aware of Telegram — messaging app. Telegram for me is love brand and a love product. The same as Apple. The reason is — beautiful UX and incomparable functions to other chats.

And especially I love how content sharing/sending functions are designed.

You just check mark the photos and videos you like. You can look into the details of photo or video without loosing those checkmarks. You sending the chosen ones.

So, I’ve started to think about the the same principle in photo & video cleaning. Choose the best ones. Delete the rest with one button. Easy.

I don’t need any “smart” AI tools. I just want to choose the photos I need and delete the rest with a single click.

At the final, I want just to enjoy the best of my photo and video memories.

And because for the last two years havn't appear this kind of solution on the market, I’ve decided to make my own photo & video cleaning app.

• UX design took me about 3 hours. It’s really easy app.
• UI design took me about 20+ hours. It’s quite minimalistic app.
• UX copy took me about 4+ hours.
• It took to the developer 250+ hours to build it. It wasn’t so easy at all. Unfortunately.

We just had no idea how long it will take. Disclaimer: We budgeted the third of money for it. So, we started slowly, and everything looked promising, the UX principles was working great, but debugging process of working with iCloud photos, saving process and cleaning processes was like unstoppable flow of crushes, where you fixing one thing and something else stops working.

But now I have it. And I'm happy. Maybe because I just invested so much time and energy and money into it. But maybe because it works.

From 25 000+ photos I was able to delete more then 21 000+ photos.

It took more hours. I wouldn't lie.

But it was a pleasure to go through my past photos, week by week, month by month. It was a pleasure to mark the photos I loved the most. It was a pleasure each time to delete the rest. From each 1000 photos in average check mark only 50 and deleting 950 photos with one click.

It's a pleasure to go through my memories in Camera Roll now.

I've called the app "Easy".
An iOS app for photo and video cleaning.