Tidy Roll
A Tinder-swipe interface for cleaning up your camera roll. Swipe right to keep, left to toss, watch the megabytes tick up. Free, no ads, no accounts, entirely on-device.
The constraint
Photo cleanup apps are a well-known dark-pattern category: they upload your library, gate the delete behind a subscription, or quietly keep a copy. The interaction itself is also wrong — a multi-select grid asks you to make a hundred decisions at once, which is why nobody finishes.
The approach
Deal photos out one card at a time and make each decision binary. Deletes are staged, never immediate: you get a summary of everything you tossed and nothing is removed until you confirm. Everything runs on-device, through the system photo library, so the space you free is space you actually get back.
- 1Fix the interaction first
Chose one-card-at-a-time over multi-select because the failure mode of photo cleanup is abandonment, not inaccuracy.
- 2Stage every destructive action
Routed deletes through the system photo library with an explicit confirmation step, so an accidental swipe is recoverable.
- 3Make the payoff visible
Surfaced reclaimed megabytes live during the session — the counter is the reason people finish a month.
- 4Ship the deck to the web
Reused the swipe deck on the marketing site so the core interaction can be tried before installing anything.
Outcomes
- Native Android and iOS app operating on the real camera roll
- Web showcase with the actual swipe deck playable in-browser, no install
- Optional desktop extension that tidies any local folder
- Staged deletes with a confirmation summary; GPL-3.0, no ads, no accounts
- Add on-device duplicate and near-duplicate detection to pre-sort the deck.
- Get the EAS builds through Play and App Store review.
- Measure completion rate per session length to find where people actually stop.
Built a cross-platform photo cleanup app with a card-swipe interaction, shipping a React Native/Expo mobile app, a Next.js showcase site with a playable demo deck, and an optional desktop browser extension.
Implemented month-by-month sessions, On This Day, albums, and bookmarks with staged deletes through the system photo library so reclaimed space is real and every deletion is confirmed.
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