OwnClean — Questions & answers

No. Every finding goes into a queue that you review as one list, and nothing leaves your library until you tap delete there. Where the choice is genuinely yours — which of two similar shots to keep, or whether a small copy you made on purpose is worth more than the original — nothing is preselected either.

Because on iOS a deleted photo is not gone. It moves to the Recently Deleted album and stays there for 30 days, still taking up room. The space comes back when you empty it, or when those 30 days pass. OwnClean says this every time it deletes, and the Overview keeps showing how much is still waiting until it is gone.

OwnClean cannot reach inside that album — and it should not, because it may hold photos you deleted yourself and kept there on purpose. It cannot tell those apart from its own, so it tells you which ones are its own (the newest, with the most days left) and you remove only those.

Yes, for 30 days, from Recently Deleted in the Photos app. After that it is gone. OwnClean shows a warning when one of its batches is within three days of that limit.

No. Everything happens on your device. There are no servers, no accounts and no analytics. When you export to a drive, the files go where you point them and nowhere else.

On the device, using Apple's own text recognition, and only when you ask it to. It keeps two things: what kind of screenshot it is, and one short line to recognise it by. The recognised text itself is never stored — screenshots hold account numbers, codes and conversations, and a second copy of all that would be a cost with no benefit.

Because they are records of something. Receipts, tickets and codes are set aside in their own section, never suggested, and never counted towards the space you could free.

Both. OwnClean measures your photo library exactly, file by file. Settings also counts caches, thumbnails and System Data, which no app can reach. There is a screen in the app explaining the difference.

No, but if your originals live in iCloud rather than on the device, they have to download before they can be exported or compressed. OwnClean warns you when you are on cellular, because that download uses your data plan.

Nothing. Compressing always writes a new file. The original is offered for deletion only after the copy is saved somewhere real and you have watched it — and even then it goes through the queue like everything else.

Because that is the one case where a cleaner would give exactly the wrong answer. To any duplicate-finder the two look like near-identical videos, and the usual rule — keep the better quality — points straight at the small copy you made on purpose. OwnClean makes no suggestion there at all.

No. OwnClean is bought once.

Yes, on iPhone and iPad.

No. OwnClean has no way to reach inside another app's storage, and System Data is not something it can read or clear. There is a screen in the app that sets out exactly what it can change, what it can only explain, and why.

Yes, and that is what Export to a drive and Bring photos back are for together. The export copies every file with a SHA-256 checksum and writes a manifest of everything that lives in Photos rather than in the file — dates, places, favourites, albums. The import reads that back into a library, with all of it, and Live Photos come back paired rather than as two loose files.

Run the export again later and only new items are copied, so the same drive stays current. Nothing is uploaded anywhere and nothing renews. What you end up with is a folder of ordinary files that opens on any computer.

Tools ▸ What is on your drive opens every file the archive lists and checks it against the checksum written at the time. It reports what it found and never changes anything. Until you run it, the app says the archive has not been read back — it does not claim a check it has not made.

Because sharpness is measured, and a measurement cannot see what a picture is of. The list of blurred shots is the softest hundredth of your own library, so most of them will have something visibly off — but "not perfect" is not "ruined", and softness is often deliberate. Nothing there is preselected, and the two lists beneath it claim nothing at all.

Still stuck? Reach the developer through this support site.