Gemini Photos Alternatives: What to Use Now

What happened to Gemini Photos?

MacPaw replaced Gemini Photos in place rather than retiring it. Gemini Photos launched in May 2018 as MacPaw’s first iOS app; in March 2024 the company rebranded and converted the same App Store listing — app ID 1277110040 — into CleanMy®Phone, keeping the ID, the listing and the accumulated review history. Existing users were auto-migrated on update and their Ignore list was carried across. Subscribers kept their legacy billing terms, and MacPaw offered refunds to anyone unhappy with the transition — an offer documented at the time of the migration, with no expiry published and no statement since about whether it is still open two years on. Nothing was delisted, so nothing appears as “removed from sale”.

That single decision explains most of the confusion around this search.

Because the listing was recycled, an old Gemini Photos link opens the CleanMy®Phone product page today, and the reviews under it are a blend of Gemini-era and CleanMy®Phone-era opinions. It also explains the most distinctive complaint theme on that listing: long-time users writing about regression against a product that no longer exists — a heavier interface, removed mass-delete and customisation options, a degraded best-shot-from-a-burst workflow, thumbnails described as too small. Those are migration grievances, not a verdict on CleanMy®Phone in isolation, and they should be read that way.

Can you get Gemini Photos back?

No, and MacPaw says so itself. Its migration page states that if you find CleanMy®Phone does not work for you, it is impossible to revert to Gemini Photos. There is no separate legacy SKU to re-download, no archived build in your purchase history to restore, and no Gemini-Photos-branded listing anywhere in the App Store, because the listing you would be looking for is the one now labelled CleanMy®Phone. The only visible residue is the in-app purchase list on that listing, which still contains legacy entries named “Gemini Photos: Yearly Access” and “Gemini Photos: Monthly Access” alongside the CleanMyPhone-branded ones.

One question MacPaw leaves open. Its migration page says the update replaces the install and that there is no way back, but it says nothing about a copy that was never updated — whether an untouched Gemini Photos on an old device still functions is undocumented, and this page has no evidence either way.

Two other things send people down false trails. MacPaw’s legacy Gemini Photos support FAQ is still live and still describes Gemini Photos as a current, installable iOS product — stale documentation, not availability, and the single most common reason someone believes the app is still obtainable. And there is an unrelated iOS app called Cleaner Gemini - Clean Storage, App Store ID 6463336428, sold by Mars Mobile LLC. It has never been a MacPaw product. MacPaw also ships a Mac duplicate finder called Gemini; that is a separate desktop product and is not what this page is about.

Which app replaces each Gemini Photos feature?

Feature by feature, not app by app, because Gemini Photos users are usually looking for one specific screen. The conclusion of the table below is that every Gemini Photos capability still exists somewhere, but the two it was best known for — similar-photo review and blurred-shot cleanup — moved to the paid side of CleanMy®Phone’s paywall, and those are the two rows where a free path exists elsewhere.

Two of PhotoBroom’s categories have no row in that table, and they are worth knowing about because they are usually where the gigabytes hide. Screen recordings are frequently the largest single files in a photo library, and they are not screenshots, not duplicates and not blurry. Short videos are the opposite problem — individually small, collectively enormous, and invisible to a tool that thinks in photo sets. PhotoBroom gives both their own category; MacPaw’s own materials are inconsistent about whether screen recordings are a first-class Declutter category in CleanMy®Phone, so this page claims nothing either way about that. The same restraint governs two rows above it: PhotoBroom’s blur sensitivity and its large-video size floor are user-adjustable, and MacPaw documents nothing at all about whether CleanMy®Phone’s equivalents can be tuned — so the table says what PhotoBroom does, and stops short of saying MacPaw’s thresholds are fixed. Scope cuts the other way too: if what you liked about Gemini Photos was that it did photo decluttering and nothing else, PhotoBroom’s seven categories stay closer to that shape than CleanMy®Phone’s current three-module spread of Declutter, Organize and Health.

Should you just stay on CleanMy®Phone?

For a lot of former Gemini Photos users, yes. If you were a Gemini Photos subscriber you kept your legacy billing terms through the migration, which is the cheapest access to that feature set anyone has, and switching forfeits it. If you already pay for Setapp or Setapp Mobile, CleanMy®Phone is bundled in at no marginal cost. And CleanMy®Phone reaches well beyond similar-photo review: video compression and Live Photo to still conversion, which reclaim storage without deleting anything; semantic organisation into Travel, People, Pets, Food and Documents; and a Health module with a device health score, storage analytics and a network speed test that is free for everyone.

None of that has a PhotoBroom equivalent. PhotoBroom never re-encodes media — it only deletes — builds no albums, and reports nothing about the device. If the reason you are reading this is that CleanMy®Phone does more than Gemini Photos did and you liked the older, narrower tool, that is a fair preference, and the head-to-head on the axes that actually differ is at PhotoBroom vs CleanMy®Phone.

What should a former Gemini Photos user install instead?

Start from the Gemini Photos feature you actually used. If it was the similar-photo review — and for most Gemini Photos users it was — PhotoBroom is the closest free path: nothing is locked, every scan result is visible, and only deletion is metered, at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos, resetting at device-local midnight. Marking a photo as kept is free and never counts against that allowance, which matters if what you liked about Gemini was working through a set deliberately, one decision at a time.

Two constraints are worth knowing before you install anything. PhotoBroom requires iOS 18.0, so on an older iPhone it is not an option and CleanMy®Phone’s iOS 17 floor or Remo’s iOS 9.0 floor decide the question for you. And PhotoBroom’s daily allowance is a poor fit for a twenty-thousand-photo backlog you want cleared this week; Pro removes the cap and adds Auto-Process All Groups, which keeps the top-scored photo in each similar group and removes the rest in one batch. The full roster of replacements, including the ad-funded and whole-phone options, is on the CleanMy®Phone alternatives page.

Whichever way you go, you are not getting Gemini Photos back. It became a different app two years ago, and the only question still open is which of its successors fits the screen you actually used.