- 4.9
- App Store rating
- 8
- languages at launch
- 8.8 MB
- to download
What it does
Pic Prune reads your photo library and groups the pictures that are nearly the same. You compare a group side by side or under a slider, keep the best one, and clear the rest. Nothing is deleted until you say so, and anything you clear can be put back.
The result is the boring, useful kind: a smaller library, storage returned, and a smaller bill for the cloud backup you had forgotten you were paying for.
Everything happens on the phone
Comparing photos is the sort of job most apps hand to a server. Pic Prune does not. The grouping runs on the device itself, on Apple's on-device frameworks, so no photo is ever uploaded and no account is ever needed.
That decision costs something. On-device work is harder to tune, slower to test, and it rules out the analytics most apps use to find out what people actually do. It buys the only privacy promise worth making: not that the photos are handled carefully somewhere else, but that they never go anywhere at all.
Small, and in eight languages
The app is 8.8 MB to download and ships in Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, including a right-to-left layout for Arabic that had to be designed rather than translated into.
It collects no data at all, which is the shortest possible answer to the App Store privacy questionnaire and the one every reader understands.
Why it is on this page
Pic Prune is our own app, designed, built, and shipped by one pair of hands, and still cared for at version 2.0. It is a consumer utility, not the kind of app most businesses come to us for.
It is here because it is the whole job in one place: the decision about what to build, the decision to do the hard thing on the device, eight languages, store review, and the years of small fixes afterwards. That is what we do for a business, on a subject small enough to see all of at once.
