Raise your hand if you’re not a fan of organising! Us neither. But a good place to start is with a little spring clean of your iPhone. These neat and tidy apps take the work out of sorting your photos, videos, contacts and apps – leaving you with plenty of time (and little excuse not) to organise your sock drawer.
Clean your Camera Roll
You love taking photos on your iPhone but deleting the unwanted ones along with screenshots can seem like a chore. Try adding Gemini Photos to the fray. This hyper-organised gallery-cleaner will categorise your photos into Similar, Blurred, Screenshots and so on. Each category differs slightly in how photos are organised.
From your Similar photos, Gemini suggests the best ones (particularly handy if you’ve taken dozens of near-identical shots in an attempt to get “the one”). If it’s a selfie, for example, the app will choose a top pick that is well focused and displays defined facial features and opened eyes!
Within each photo category the app arranges your photos by month and you can then browse through the collection, swiping up to save a snap and down to erase.
And how about photos you want to keep indefinitely? Tap on the eye icon at the top-right corner of your photo. This tells Gemini to save that photo to the Ignore List so you won’t be asked again if it should be erased (view this list whenever you want under the Menu).
Sort your videos
A good rule of thumb for housecleaning is to start with the big things. Incidentally, the same goes for cleaning your iPhone.
Smart Cleaner can find and show you all the videos on your iPhone according to their size. If you are unsure which files to erase first, try weeding through the larger ones. When you select and delete a video, it’s not only removed from your device but also from iCloud.
We know it’s no fun looking through each and every file though. With a paid subscription, Smart Cleaner will automatically clean your device; it does its homework and removes any redundant photos and videos. You can recover the removed items from the Recently Deleted list within 30 days.
Who’s who in your contacts
Set Cinder to synchronise with your primary contacts, then you can see all the stored contacts on your iPhone like a deck of cards. Swipe right to keep a contact, swipe left to mark a contact for deletion. Once you empty the bin holding those discarded numbers, you’re done.
Rearrange your apps
A tidy desk makes for a tidy mind and so it goes for tidy apps on your screen. We’re talking about placing frequently used apps where they are easily accessible and creating folders for apps with similar themes – you know it makes sense.
On your home screen, press and hold any app until the x mark appears and the icons begin to wobble. While dragging one app icon, lightly tap another app icon, then another. The icons then become one stack.
Continue dragging the stack and drop them where you want. It’s an easy way to move multiple apps simultaneously. Using the same method, if you drag stacked apps on top of another app, a new folder is created to catch all the apps.
To view all the downloaded apps at once on your iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Here, you’ll see your installed apps in order of size, making it simple to see how much free space you have.