An engraving of a scythe beside sheaves of wheat

A simple, free photo library manager for iPhone

Gather

Heart the photos you love and Gather keeps them forever. Everything else stays in your library for 90 days, with a chance to look back through it, and then Gather helps you clear it out whenever you're ready.

Coming to the App Store

How it works

Photos move through three stages

Gather sorts your library by age. Hearting a photo takes it off the timeline for good.

Days 0–30

Settling

New photos are left alone. Gather doesn't show them or touch them. Just heart your favorites in Photos the way you already do.

Days 30–90

Review

Gather shows you the photos you haven't hearted in small batches, starting with photos of people and the ones closest to 90 days. Heart the ones you want to keep and skip the rest. Skipped photos come back next time.

Day 90 and older

Ready to clear

After 90 days, photos you haven't hearted are ready to clear. They stay right where they are until you open Clear space and choose to delete them.

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.

Deleting is up to you

Nothing is deleted until you say so

Gather never deletes anything in the background. A photo that's ready to clear stays in your library until you've gone through every step below.

  1. Tap Clear space You

    Whenever you like. There are no reminders, and nothing runs on a schedule.

  2. See exactly what goes

    You'll see every photo in the batch, oldest first, up to 500 at a time. Spot one you'd like to keep? Heart it first and it stays.

  3. Confirm in Gather You

    Gather asks you to confirm, and lets you know that deleting also removes the photos from iCloud and your other devices.

  4. Confirm again with iOS You

    Your iPhone asks one more time, for the whole batch at once.

  5. 30 days to change your mind

    Deleted photos wait in Recently Deleted, under Utilities in the Photos app, for 30 days, so you can still bring them back.

  • Nothing is ever deleted automatically.
  • You see every photo before it's deleted.
  • At most 500 photos at a time.
  • A deletion log in Settings shows what was removed and why.
  • No account, no ads, no tracking. Gather doesn't send anything off your iPhone.

Who it's for

A lighter library, at your own pace.

Gather is for anyone whose camera roll has grown bigger than they'd like. It keeps the last three months plus everything you've hearted, and helps you let the rest go when you're ready. If you'd rather keep every photo, that's completely fine. Gather just might not be the app for you.