An engraving of a scythe beside sheaves of wheat

An opinionated photo library manager for iPhone

Gather

Heart the photos you love and they're kept forever. Everything else gets 90 days in your library, a chance to be rescued, and then it's cleared when you say so, never before.

Coming to the App Store

How it works

Every photo moves through three phases

Gather sorts your library by age. A heart takes a photo out of the timeline entirely.

Days 0–30

Settling

New photos are left completely alone. Gather doesn't show them, rank them, or touch them. Heart your favorites in Photos the way you already do.

Days 30–90

Review

Gather offers unhearted photos back to you in small batches, photos with faces and those nearest the deadline first. Heart the keepers, skip the rest. Skipped photos come back next time.

Day 90 and older

Due for deletion

Unhearted photos past 90 days are due. They stay right where they are in your library until you open Clear space and delete them yourself.

Kept forever. Hearted photos are never reviewed and never deleted, whether they're a day old or a decade old. Photos in albums you choose are kept too.

30 and 90 days are the defaults. You can change both in Settings.

Deletion is opt-in

Nothing is deleted until you say so. Twice.

Gather never deletes in the background. Photos being due is just a label until you go through every step below.

  1. Tap Clear space You

    Only when you choose to. Gather never prompts, nags, or schedules it.

  2. See exactly what goes

    A grid of every photo in the batch with its date range, oldest first, at most 500 at a time. Want to save one? Heart it first.

  3. Confirm in Gather You

    A clearly marked delete button and a confirmation that says plainly the deletion syncs to iCloud and all your devices.

  4. Confirm again with iOS You

    iPhone asks once more for the whole batch. Gather can't skip this step and wouldn't want to.

  5. 30 days to change your mind

    Deleted photos sit in Recently Deleted in the Photos app, under Utilities, for 30 days before they're gone for good.

  • No automatic or background deletion, ever.
  • You see every photo before it's deleted.
  • No more than 500 photos per run.
  • A deletion log in Settings lets you check what was removed and why.
  • No account, no server, no tracking. Everything stays on your iPhone.

Opinionated on purpose

Most photos are for a moment, not forever.

Gather keeps your library to the last 90 days plus everything you've hearted. If you'd rather keep every photo just in case, Gather isn't for you, and that's fine.