Year-End Camera Roll Review

December is the one month you go back through the whole year on purpose, looking for photographs to send to people or to put somewhere. It is also the only time you see how much of it is the same picture, taken four times, on one afternoon.

Cleanor works with that scroll rather than against it. Duplicates and near-identical shots come up grouped by moment, so you keep the version that held up and close the year with a library you have actually read.

There is a peculiar thing about a camera roll: you build it all year and almost never read it. December is the exception. You go back through it looking for a photograph to send, and in the process you see the year as a whole, including the parts of it that are four versions of a lunch and a screenshot of a boarding pass from April.

That is a better position to judge from than any other month of the year. Twelve months is long enough to know which photographs you went back to and which you never opened again, and short enough that you still remember the day. Curation is easy with that information and impossible without it, which is why cleaning in a panic never works.

Cleanor groups the repeats by moment, so the choice is between five photographs of one afternoon rather than between five thousand photographs of a year. Nothing goes until you have seen it, which is the only acceptable arrangement when the subject is your own life. What you keep is the year as you would tell it, rather than as the camera happened to record it.