Summer Camera Roll Refresh
In summer your camera roll grows faster than you review it. Ten minutes between weekends keeps you ahead of it, so you are never deleting in a hurry to make room for one more.
Free up 3 GB in a single sitting
- Target
- 3 GB
- Runs
- June 15 to July 31
- Status
- Returns June 15
Free up 3 GB, or review the whole seasonal queue. Either one completes the challenge, so you never have to delete a photo you wanted in order to finish.
Get Cleanor and be readyWhy this moment feels timely
Summer fills the phone faster than any other season, and it does it in the middle of everything else. More trips, more clips, more of the same beach shot taken four times because the light kept changing.
Cleanor is built for the short pass rather than the annual purge: last weekend’s duplicates, the long videos, the screenshots from planning something that has already happened.
Where Cleanor helps first
The clutter worth going after this season, and a sensible order to do it in.
What Cleanor looks at
- Heavy 4K video from the weekend
- Repeat shots from the same afternoon
- Screenshots left over from planning
- Short review sessions, not a full audit
How to approach it
- Treat it as a ten-minute pass, not a project. One weekend of photos at a time is a size you will actually finish.
- Start with the video. Summer clips are long and shot in 4K, and two or three decisions there free more room than a hundred stills.
- Do it on the Sunday, while you still know which shot was the good one. A backlog of three trips is a backlog nobody clears.
Why this is worth doing now
The arithmetic of summer is simple. You take more photographs in June and July than in any other stretch of the year, and you sort exactly as many as you always did, which is none. Every weekend adds four hundred frames and a handful of long videos, and none of them get reviewed while the season is still going, because something else is always happening.
Which means the cleanup happens at the worst moment: the phone is full, you are somewhere good, and you are deleting whatever the small screen tells you is expendable. The alternative is not a big annual clear-out. It is ten minutes on a Sunday, on the weekend that has just ended, while you still remember which of the four beach shots was the one you liked.
Cleanor is quick enough for that to be realistic. It groups the repeats from a single stretch of days, surfaces the videos that are quietly taking gigabytes, and lets you clear them in one pass without opening a full audit of your library. Stay a weekend ahead all summer and the phone never fills up at all, which is a better outcome than being good at emptying it.
Useful pages around this challenge
What comes up next
The seasonal moments arriving soonest after this one.
Vacation Video Review
One trip can outweigh a year of photographs. A few minutes of 4K footage runs to gigabytes, so the fastest way back to free space is to review the videos first.
Open the challengeRunning now, to September 20Back-to-School Screenshot Reset
Screenshots are information with an expiry date, stored like photographs that never have one. A term’s worth of schedules, reading lists and receipts is the easiest thing to clear.
Open the challengeStarts in 17 daysClean Before the Transfer
A transfer moves whatever you point it at, including years of duplicates and videos you have never rewatched. Clean the old iPhone first: less to move, and a camera roll you chose.
Open the challenge