Wedding Season Photo Cleanup
As a guest you come home with three hundred reception shots and an eleven-minute video of vows you watched from the back. The professional already covered it. Keep the few that landed.
Free up 5 GB of reception shots
- Target
- 5 GB
- Runs
- June 1 to July 15
- Status
- Returns June 1
Free up 5 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
Weddings are photographed twice. Once by someone hired to do it well, and once by a hundred guests holding phones above their heads during the same three minutes of the ceremony.
The guest version is the one that never gets sorted. Cleanor is for that camera roll: the burst of forty reception shots, the eleven-minute clip of the vows, the same toast from four angles.
Where Cleanor helps first
The clutter worth going after this season, and a sensible order to do it in.
What Cleanor looks at
- Reception bursts, dozens of frames of one moment
- Long ceremony clips, among the heaviest files you carry
- The handful of shots that actually landed
- Space back before the next invitation
How to approach it
- Begin with the videos. A single ceremony clip usually outweighs every photo you took that day.
- Work through the reception bursts next and keep one frame per moment, not eight versions of the same toast.
- Be honest about what you will rewatch. The couple has an album from someone who was standing much closer.
Why this is worth doing now
Almost everything written about wedding photos speaks to the couple. This is for the guests. The couple gets an album from a professional who was standing at the front with the right lens. You get several hundred photos, a very long video of a ceremony you watched from the back, and no particular reason to open any of it again once the week is over.
That leaves a specific and quite heavy kind of clutter. Long clips are among the largest files on most phones, and reception bursts produce dozens of frames of the same moment. Cleanor handles both: the near-duplicates get grouped so you can keep the shots that landed, and the heavy videos sitting untouched since June get surfaced rather than found by accident.
The season is the reason to do it now rather than later. If there are two or three weddings on your calendar between June and mid July, that weight arrives again and again, and clearing it between events takes minutes where clearing it in October takes an evening. What you are left with is a handful of photos worth keeping, and the point is that they are findable.
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 16 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