In 2023, according to the most reliable estimates, we took approximately 1.31 trillion images: that’s 57 thousand shots per second, or 5 billion per day. And it doesn’t end here, because we replicate a stratospheric number of them (6.9 billion daily) sending them via WhatsApp or other messaging apps.
A large portion of these images end up flood the memories of our smartphoneswith albums and archives that collect thousands and thousands of photos (the writer’s iPhone has around 48 thousand at the moment).
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Everything on the cloud
To solve the problem, Apple and Google have followed so far a similar path on both iPhone and Android: Cloud storage. After all, it is the simplest solution. In large data centers there are no memory problems and users can even enjoy the convenience of a photo library synchronized across all their devices. Lighter versions of the photo remain on smartphones, with the possibility to download the original only when needed.
Remote storage doesn’t solve it though another fundamental aspect of the problem, namely the total uselessness of a significant part of the images we save on the smartphone. Between duplicates, replicated photos, selfies with eyes closed or an unhappy expression, functional shots of receipts and receipts, how many of the Images do we really need them that are part of our library?
More than delegating the burden of ephemeral and worthless memoriesIn fact, a good cleaning would be needed, that is, a selection operation which in photography has a specific name: culling. In the professional field, artificial intelligence has already revolutionized (positively) this phase of the photographic process. Tools like Aftershoot, Imagen or Narrative employ AI to automate the selection process. I’m able to merge similar images, discard the blurry ones or in which subjects have their eyes closed.
They work surprisingly well and many photographers have already included them in their workflow. The question therefore arises spontaneously: why are there no similar applications for smartphones? Why have neither Google nor Apple, which have revolutionized computational photography thanks to AI over the last 10 years, yet provided us with anything similar on Android or iOS?
Remove duplicates
Although on both operating systems it is still missing an integrated AI-based culling systemover the last two years, smart functions have begun to emerge that go precisely in this direction.
Con iOS16, Apple has introduced an automatic duplicate photo detection function on iPhone that allows you to analyze duplicates in the Library and merge them. Just open Photos, go to the Albums screen and scroll down to Otherthen tap on the item Duplicates. In the next screen we will have access to a list of duplicates, with an indication of what distinguishes them (for example the weight, in case they were two different resolutions). With a tap join, the smartphone combines the metadata of the two images and keeps the higher resolution one. To get started you can also select all the images to combine all the duplicates in one tap.
Google Photos and similar photos
They are Android and they are Google Photo A similar, but more powerful, function has recently arrived for iOS. In addition to finding exact duplicates, the Big G app is now able to recognize similar images, for example a series of selfies or similar shots made on holiday to find the perfect framing and light. The AI groups them together and selects the potentially best one, using it as the cover for an automatic collection that combines visually similar images.
All the photos remain available with a tap and the user can always select a photo different from the one automatically chosen for the cover, and possibly delete the ones that turned out badly more quickly and efficiently. It’s not an automatic culling system yet, but it’s very close. The function can also be deactivated if you always want to see all the images. The most recent update Google Photos has also introduced an automatic archiving function for screenshots, which often contribute to making the photo library on the smartphone much more disorganized. Thanks to AI, the app recognizes the content and can sort it into specific albums such as Receipts or Events.
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Culling apps
It may seem surprising, but in the era of artificial intelligence In any case, the built-in AI-based features for iPhone and Android selection more or less stop there. Again: why have neither Google nor Apple yet thought of actually using AI for this purpose, with a real image selection and collection function? If you want to be a bit conspiracy theorist, you might think that the economic incentive is missing: selling additional space on the cloud to make room for smartphones is a multi-billion dollar business and one of the fundamental entry points for the sale of services such as iCloud and Google One. Making it easier to delete large numbers of photos with AI doesn’t benefit anyone.
There are obviously other methods to try and streamline a photo library with professional apps like Lightroom (all paid), but these are tools designed to process series of well-defined shots and not collections of tens of thousands of photos completely different in terms of subject and location. Furthermore, the process becomes more complicated because the images are duplicated in the catalog and need to be exported again to replace the existing ones. In short: we do not recommend it.
Canon had already created an app based on the Phil deep learning system in 2021, which worked exactly as it should: it was enough to give access to the library and the software, thanks to AI, proceeded with the selection of the best shots and the grouping of those to be removed in to simplify the review process.
Unfortunately the experiment did not go well and the app has been abandoned and removed from the App Store during 2023. During the research for writing this article we tried to understand if similar apps exist for both iPhone and Android, but to no avail: if you know any let us know.
It takes natural intelligence
The only one proven and effective solution to streamline your library It still involves sifting through your phone’s images manually. We usually do this: we create an album To be deleted and then we move on to a rough quick selection of all the images, moving as many as possible into the album. From here we proceed to a second step of the photos in the collection, doing the opposite (i.e. removing from the album To be deleted the ones we want to save instead). Once the process is finished, which is useful to repeat a couple of times to be safe, we select the images in the album and move them to the trash. AND a slow and tedious systemwhich requires a few hours of our time and a lot of patience.