Kept guides

Plain-English guides to clearing space on your iPhone — without losing what matters. Written by the team behind Kept.

• How to free up storage on iPhone without losing your memories

  A step-by-step guide to clearing space on a full iPhone — find what's eating storage, clear photos safely, and keep the shots that matter.

• How to delete duplicate photos on iPhone (and what Apple’s tool misses)

  Apple’s built-in Duplicates finds exact copies for free. Here’s how to use it — and how to clear the near-duplicate bursts and blurry shots it misses.

• iPhone storage still full after deleting photos? Here’s why

  You deleted photos but your iPhone storage didn’t drop. The usual reasons — Recently Deleted, System Data, iCloud — and how to actually reclaim the space.

• How to delete blurry photos on iPhone (without scrolling for hours)

  iOS has no built-in blurry-photo finder. How to spot and delete blurry shots by hand — and how Kept pre-judges them on-device.

• How to delete burst photos on iPhone: keep the best frame, drop the rest

  Bursts hide dozens of near-identical frames in one stack. Find the Bursts album, keep only your favorites, and reclaim the space they quietly eat.

• How to delete screenshots on iPhone (and bulk-delete them fast)

  Your Screenshots album fills with receipts, memes and saved info. Find it, multi-select fast, and bulk-delete safely — plus a faster way to swipe through them.

• How to find large videos eating storage on your iPhone

  Long 4K and slo-mo videos are the biggest files on most iPhones. Find them with iPhone Storage and Photos — and clear the heaviest ones safely.

• iCloud storage vs iPhone storage: what’s the difference?

  iCloud storage is the cloud plan you pay for; iPhone storage is the space on the phone. How they differ, what Optimize Storage does, and why your phone fills up anyway.

• How to delete all photos of one person on iPhone (gently, and for good)

  Clearing photos of an ex or someone you’ve grown apart from? The manual People album route, why it misses shots — and how to gather every photo of one person in one calm pass.

• Best free photo cleaner for iPhone (2026): what to look for

  What iOS already does for free, how to spot the hidden weekly-subscription trap, and a checklist for choosing a cleaner you can trust.

• How much storage do 20,000 photos use?

  A 12 MP HEIC photo is roughly 2–3 MB, so 20,000 of them land around 40–60 GB. The math per format, why one video outweighs hundreds of photos, and how to read your own real number.

• How to delete thousands of photos on iPhone at once

  The drag-select technique, the order that frees the most space first, why “delete all” is the wrong tool, and how to make the space actually come back.

• Why is my camera roll full of photos I didn’t take?

  Memes, forwarded pictures and app-saved copies quietly outnumber your own photos. How to tell which app saved what, switch the auto-saving off, and clear the backlog.

• How to back up your photos before you delete anything

  iCloud Photos is sync, not a backup — a delete travels to every device. How to make a real, independent copy, verify it, and only then start clearing.

• Are photo cleaner apps safe? What they can actually see

  What granting Photos access really allows, what iOS enforces no matter what an app claims, and how to test whether a cleaner uploads your photos.

• How to recover deleted photos on iPhone (and how to archive instead)

  Deleted photos sit in Recently Deleted for 30 days. How to get them back, what iCloud Photos changes, and what is still possible after the 30 days are up.

Tools & reference

• Calculator: how much storage do your iPhone photos use?

  Put in how many photos you have and see the estimate by format — HEIC, JPEG, ProRAW, Live Photos, video — then read your own real number off your phone.

• Glossary — 12 photo-storage terms

  HEIC, ProRAW, Live Photo, Recently Deleted, System Data: what each one means, and what it costs you in space.