My mom asked me for help every time her iPhone filled up, even though I had subscribed to the highest iCloud plan. But in her perception, the phone turned into a 5 kg dumbbell every month.
The conversation was always the same: she did not know what she could delete, she was afraid of losing an important photo, and in the end she kept five photos from the same angle and an 18 GB gallery she would never be able to organize by herself. Fine, I have 18 thousand photos, but in my defense, I have cats.
Every time I tried to find an app that solved this, I came back with a shrug she did not like very much. The existing ones were either too technical, too invasive, too expensive, or simply did not offer the safety she needed to act with confidence. Some managed to be all of those things at once. So I made GalleryCheckup.
The focus of the app is exactly the point missing from the others: helping a user, maybe an older one, clean their gallery on their own, with clarity and without fear. It identifies duplicate photos, blurry photos, forgotten screenshots, and that mountain of images WhatsApp saves by default from neighborhood group chats. Then it presents everything in a way that anyone, even someone who is not comfortable with technology, can review and decide what stays and what goes. The app does not decide for you; it gives you enough context to decide without panicking.
There is something interesting about designing for a specific person: you stop assuming what the user knows. When the imaginary user has a full name, and sleeps under the same roof, every UX decision becomes a concrete question. “Would my mom understand this button?” is a surprisingly effective filter.
The result is an app that works like a kind of personal trainer for your gallery: patient, organized, and unwilling to let you do anything irreversible unless you are sure. Available at gallerycheckup.app. And yes, my mom uses it. She even subscribes, for free, because I gave her a code.