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Selects:
In photography, selects are the chosen few — the shots worth keeping. We help you find them.
Selects is an iOS app that helps you ruthlessly, intelligently, and privately cull your photo library down to the shots that actually matter.
No subscription. No upload. No cloud. Every pixel stays on your device.
Your Camera Roll is a crime scene. Thousands of near-identical burger photos. Seven consecutive shots of a dog that blinked in six of them. Screenshots of tweets you'll never look at again. Selects is the detective.
The app groups your photos into clusters — bursts of shots taken within 10 seconds of each other — and lets you swipe through them in a card deck. Keep the good stuff. Bin the rest. Move on with your life.
It also runs a full Lab diagnostic that hunts down duplicates, blurry shots, dark frames, and disposable junk across your entire library — all without sending a single photo anywhere but the screen in front of you.
Swipe through your photo library cluster by cluster. Photos taken close together are shown as a group so you can judge them in context — not in isolation.
- Clean Mode — review and delete
- Curate Mode — review and add keepers to an album
- Full-screen viewer — inspect before you decide
- Undo — 10-second grace period before anything is final
Surface exactly what you want to review. Selects uses Apple's Vision framework — on your device, using your Neural Engine — to classify every photo by content.
No image ever leaves your phone to make this happen. Not one.
Find the files eating your storage alive. Heavy Hitters surfaces your largest media files so you can reclaim gigabytes without wading through your entire library.
A quarterly or yearly deep scan of your library that identifies:
| Category | What It Finds |
|---|---|
| Duplicates & Similars | Pixel-level near-matches using Vision feature prints |
| Clutter | Blurry frames, dark/underexposed shots, low-quality captures |
| Disposable Media | Screenshots, receipts, and other throwaway captures |
Results are cached — you can pause, close the app, and pick up exactly where you left off.
A visual heatmap of your entire library across years. See where your photos are dense, jump to a specific month, and kick off a focused review from any point in time.
Nothing is gone until you say it's gone. Every deletion lands in the Bin first. Restore anything individually or in full clusters — or empty the Bin when you're satisfied.
This isn't a privacy policy. It's a technical fact:
Selects has no servers. There is no backend. There is no account to create. There is no API call that sends your photos anywhere.
Every AI classification, every duplicate fingerprint, every blur detection — all of it runs on your iPhone using Apple's on-device Vision and Core ML frameworks. The Neural Engine on your device does the heavy lifting. We just ask it nicely.
When you grant photo library access, your photos stay exactly where they are. We read them to analyze them. We never move them off your device.
For the technically curious:
- Clustering: Photos taken within 10 seconds of each other are grouped into a single card
-
Classification:
VNClassifyImageRequestmaps each photo to one of 28+ semantic tags -
Duplicate detection:
VNGenerateImageFeaturePrintRequestgenerates vector fingerprints; Euclidean distance finds near-matches - Blur detection: Motion blur identified as a classification signal, not a separate model call
- Concurrency: Vision jobs are capped (1–4 concurrent ops depending on device) to prevent Neural Engine saturation — the cause of the infamous "3-second lag" you've seen in lesser apps
- Storage awareness: iCloud Optimize Storage is handled gracefully; tiny placeholder images are never misidentified as duplicates
All processing is priority-queued: visible cards get analyzed first, background work fills idle cycles.
- iPhone (iOS 17+)
- iPad (iOS 17+) — grid layout optimized for larger screens
- Open Selects and grant photo library access (or a limited selection — your call)
- Start with Library Review for everyday maintenance
- Run Lab Diagnostics for a deep clean
- Check Heavy Hitters when you need storage fast
- Use Archive to travel back in time and review old photo periods
The Bin is always there if you change your mind.
Found a bug? Have a feature request? Want to share that Selects just helped you delete 2GB of near-identical sunset photos and you feel like a new person?
📬 selects-support@shriansh.com
Selects — made with care (and mild horror at the state of the average camera roll) by Shriansh Shrivastava.