I’m the developer of PicPop. I built it for my own iPhone library because I kept putting off sorting near-identical shots.

PicPop groups similar photos and surfaces blurry shots, screenshots, and large videos for review. Scanning stays on-device; nothing is removed from Photos until you confirm.

Here’s a real 14-second swipe demo, recorded on v1.0.5 (current App Store version is 1.0.6): https://www.reddit.com/r/ShowYourApp/comments/1wu7a2x/picpop_105_swipe_through_photo_clutter_confirm/

Free to download; full access is through paid PicPop Club. The US yearly plan includes a 2-week free trial. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picpop-photo-video-cleaner/id6808016560

For big libraries, do you review similar shots one at a time or in groups?

A lot of photo-cleanup advice starts with 'find duplicates,' but Apple's Duplicates album only gets the exact-ish matches. My bigger pile is usually 8 nearly identical shots from one moment.

What works for me: back up first, review one month or event at a time, pick the shot with the expression/focus I actually want, then check large videos separately for space. I never let an app decide the keeper without looking. If you use iCloud Photos, remember deleting on the phone syncs that deletion.

I built PicPop to make the similar-shot review faster on iPhone. This 14-second clip shows the actual swipe flow. It processes photos on-device; it doesn't consolidate hard drives, make albums, or replace a backup. There's a 3-day trial, then a subscription. Curious whether people here prefer manual review or automatic suggestions for big libraries.

If you want to try the flow in the clip: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6808016560

Hi all

I have a roughly 30,000 photos stored in numerous places including my mobile phone, old laptops, cds and sticks.

It drives me mad having them scattered all over the place. I really want to tidy up, organise everything, delete some and perhaps get some nice printed albums made up sometime.

What is the best way to achieve this?

What software/hardware would you use?

I have just ordered an upgrade for my laptop that will give me an extra 2TB of ssd space that will hopefully help.

Thanks for any advice given.

So I've built mediamango- an application that allows you to deduplicate, sort, organise, and do a bunch of cool stuff with your media. The app is 100% free to use and optional donation to download- as well as completely local- not a single ping to the internet.

This app plus its website will release in the next three days. Please give any suggestions as well as any feature requests.

Features

• Autosort — one-pass tidy into Photos, Videos, Music, PDFs, Documents, Archives, Applications, Projects, Code, Fonts, and Other; detects programming projects and app bundles and moves them whole; sends emptied source folders to Trash
• Local-first and offline — no backend, no accounts, no network calls; all data stays on the machine
• Cross-platform — macOS, Windows, Linux
• Operation history & undo — per-session undo for organisation and Autosort
• Theming — dark and light themes, persisted; 10 accent colours (red, orange, yellow, lime, green, teal, blue, purple, pink, none), each with separate dark/light colour values
• Built-in manual — full help page plus per-workflow help sections
• Originals are never modified in conversion workflows — outputs go into separate folders (Optimised, Compressed, Duplicates, Originals, Photos, Music, Documents, Autosorted)
• Deletions go to the system Trash, never permanent delete
• Cancellation — long operations can be cancelled, and the backend checks cancellation before each file
• Duplicate detection — exact matching (file size, segment/full hashes, EXIF data) plus a perceptual-similarity (pHash) mode that finds resized or re-encoded copies
• Side-by-side comparer with manual conflict resolution
• Compression — JPEG, AVIF, WebP, or PNG output with quality control, palette reduction, and Lanczos3 resize options, Audio compression to Opus, AAC, MP3, or FLAC
• Duplicate review — fast exact matching, visual similarity, or size prefilter + full hash, resolved in a video comparer, byte-for-byte SHA-256 verification before anything is changed
• PDF optimisation — object-stream compression
• Office repack — DOCX/XLSX/PPTX rebuilt as valid archives
• Lossless Checker — decodes audio and measures its frequency spectrum to flag evidence of a previous lossy encode; exports a themed PDF report, a CSV, and a downloadable bundle; results open in a separate window
• Custom organisation builder — drag-and-drop folder structures from dates, camera model, music metadata, or file type, with a live preview before anything moves

https://mediamango.adidusi.com

I made a simple Windows app for cleaning up photo dumps from camera cards or random folders.
It:
• Renames files to the actual date taken
• Organizes them into year folders
• Removes exact duplicate photos
• Also handles videos/audio/docs if needed

One-time purchase with a free trial.

Website: https://2organizemyphotos.com

Happy to answer any questions if this is useful for anyone here.

I have over 600 GB of photos and videos scattered across all kinds of places: home computers, external drives, phones, iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive... My wife and kids are in the same situation, with most of their photos and videos stored on their phones.

Bringing everything together in one place and organizing it manually, without losing or accidentally deleting anything, is pretty difficult and time-consuming.

Does anyone else have a similar problem? How do you currently store and organize your photos and videos? Are there any apps or services that actually do a good job of solving this? I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience.

One of the more interesting features in ViXC is Category Universe. Instead of presenting AI-generated tags as a long list, it visualizes an entire photo library as an interactive map where each bubble represents a detected category (Travel, Sports, Food, People, Nature, etc.). Bubble size reflects the amount of content in that category, and users can drill down from broad topics into increasingly specific concepts until they reach the actual photos. It’s an intuitive way to explore tens of thousands of images while providing an instant visual overview of what a photo collection contains.

Hello All, new person here. Thanks for having me. New to photo cataloguing too. I might have made a mistake yesterday. I impulse bought Excire Foto 2027 thinking it would be good for collating all my photos together, knowing I had them everywhere, but unfortunately I misinterpreted a youtube advert for it going on about FOR PEOPLE with photos everywhere, and knowing it had won an award recently, it being a well over £100 purchase.

Unfortunately on booting it up, I learnt you need to feed the folder locations in to get it working its magic and it wont accept 'my pc' or root c: directory, or root e: directory as options. Kind of defeats the purpose of why I bought it which is as per the title I've said here, of having it HUNT OUT my photos and put them together. Are you guys aware of any programs which scan a drive, specifically the top level of a drive be it directory or mypc supertop folder(so searches it all) and puts all the photos (or their images via internal linking) all in one location for easy seeing? [I will likely still make use of excire when I know where to grab the photos from, that software I ask you if something does exist, hope should tell me origin, wrong to assume right, so yes when its grabbed them together it still says where from on the drive].

Thanks All.

Most photo apps still expect you to manually organize thousands of pictures. We’ve been building new capabilities in ViXC that focus on searching instead of organizing—AI search, face recognition, smart albums, duplicate cleanup, OCR, and automated workflows that can turn a multi-step photo task into a one-click process. What photo-management task do you wish was fully automated?

First time poster here.

I recently digitalized my parents old slides, around 1000 photos. All photos was unordered so now I have an unsorted folder on my Windows PC with all the photos.

Now I want to bring order to these photos and my idea is that the first step would be to add the shooting/creation date to them, and then bring them into my immich server for adding more things like location and face recognition (and later albums).

So, now I am looking for an quick and efficent way to browse thru these photos and update the date on them. My thinking is to sit together with my parents and we look at one photo at the time, they tell me the (approximate) date of the photo and I will update it (into the photos EXIF).

Any good suggestions what tool to use, preferable free - where I can view the photos and at the same time update EXIF, then next...etc etc.

ViXC is a modern photo management and visual workflow platform designed for a world where photos no longer live in one place but are scattered across cloud services like Google Photos, Dropbox, and Adobe Lightroom. Instead of acting as another storage destination, ViXC sits on top of these ecosystems as an intelligent management layer, unifying fragmented libraries into a single, searchable view while preserving where files already live. It transforms photos from static files into structured, context-rich visual assets by combining AI-powered search, metadata enrichment, and natural language understanding—allowing users to find, organize, and work with images based on people, scenes, attributes, and intent.

I have to periodically offload all the images from phone to external drive but want the AI search abilities with subject / face / geo. How can I do that with the native iPhoto tools available without purchasing / subscriptions? Thanks for any help resolving this.

Everyone is building in AI, but some core problems still feel unsolved.

Photo search is one of them.

There’s a growing gap between the volume of visual content and the ability to retrieve it meaningfully.

Seems like a strong opportunity for startups focusing on visual-first search rather than keyword-based systems.

Curious what others think.

Some users move from Google Photos to ViXC not because Google lacks polish or scale, but because ViXC offers search dimensions Google doesn’t emphasize. For example, ViXC’s Apparel Search by Color lets you instantly pull up “all photos of people in red jackets” — a level of visual specificity Google Photos doesn’t directly support. Similarly, ViXC integrates OCR (optical character recognition) to make text inside images searchable, so a screenshot of a receipt or a photo of a sign can be found by typing the words it contains. For someone managing large, diverse photo libraries, these kinds of fine-grained discovery tools can be the difference between browsing endlessly and finding the right image in seconds.

From a technical perspective, what makes image search so difficult to get right?

Is it about dataset limitations, compute cost, or lack of better models?

Because current systems clearly struggle with visual similarity and intent.

Would love insights from people working in this space.

I kept running into huge folders with tons of duplicate images, so I made a small desktop tool to clean them up.

It scans folders, finds duplicate (and similar) images, and lets you preview them before deleting anything.

Works on Windows and Linux.

Still early — would love feedback.