PhotoBroom vs CleanMy®Phone

What separates two cleaners that both keep your photos on the phone?

CleanMy®Phone, commonly written CleanMyPhone, is MacPaw’s iPhone cleaner.

The usual dividing line in this category does not apply here. Both apps analyse the library on the device and upload nothing, and both sell a one-time lifetime unlock alongside subscriptions — though whether MacPaw’s lifetime option reaches every storefront or is a targeted offer is not something a product page can settle. Either way, neither the privacy pitch nor the anti-subscription pitch decides this one. The paywall does. CleanMy®Phone’s free tier decides which categories you may open; PhotoBroom’s opens all seven and meters how much you may delete. Past that, CleanMy®Phone can shrink a video or flatten a Live Photo instead of removing it, where PhotoBroom only deletes — and MacPaw’s US privacy label declares identifiers used to track you, where PhotoBroom’s declares no tracking at all.

The table below is the argument in one place. Neither app wins every column, and the column that decides it for most readers is what a non-paying user is allowed to do.

Was CleanMy®Phone once Gemini Photos?

Yes, and knowing that changes how every review of this app should be read — including the ones quoted further down this page. App Store ID 1277110040 was the Gemini Photos listing; MacPaw converted it in place in March 2024 rather than shipping a new SKU, auto-migrated existing users, carried over the Ignore list, and states on its own migration page that reverting to Gemini Photos is not possible. Legacy in-app purchase names such as “Gemini Photos: Yearly Access” are still visible on the listing.

The practical consequence is that the review history on this listing blends Gemini-era and CleanMy®Phone-era reviews, and a recurring, clearly attributable theme in it is regression against Gemini Photos specifically — slower and heavier navigation, removed mass-delete and customisation options, a degraded best-shot-from-a-burst workflow, thumbnails described as too small. Those are real complaints from real users. They are also a migration grievance, not a verdict on the app in isolation, and the difference is worth holding onto.

A second thing has to be held onto alongside it, and it applies to every user report quoted further down this page. Which build a complaint corresponds to cannot be recovered from a review feed. MacPaw ships fixes regularly and recent release notes emphasise stability, so some of what users described may already be fixed — which is why the reports below are attributed to users and never restated here as the app’s current behaviour. If you arrived here looking for Gemini Photos, the Gemini Photos alternatives page covers what happened and what maps onto what.

How do the two free tiers differ in practice?

The difference is what a non-paying user is allowed to look at. In CleanMy®Phone a free user can act on Largest Videos, Screenshots and Organize → Other, and MacPaw’s knowledge base is explicit that duplicates, similar photos and blurred photos sit on the premium side — so the headline reason people install a photo cleaner is the part a free CleanMy®Phone user cannot reach. In PhotoBroom nothing is locked and no scan result is hidden: every one of the seven categories opens, and only deletion is metered, at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos.

Neither structure is more honest than the other. A category gate is a conventional feature paywall; a daily allowance is a usage meter. They fail in opposite directions, and the table below makes that concrete on five real jobs — CleanMy®Phone takes two of the five outright.

The honest summary of those rows: if what you want is oversized videos gone and screenshots swept, CleanMy®Phone’s free tier does that with no daily ceiling and PhotoBroom’s does not. If what you want is to see and act on your near-duplicates without paying, only PhotoBroom offers a path.

Do PhotoBroom or CleanMy®Phone upload your photos?

Neither, on the evidence each publishes. MacPaw’s CleanMy®Phone support FAQ states that the app scans and processes the photo library on the device and needs no internet connection for analysis, and its safety page states that files stay only on the device. PhotoBroom analyses photos and videos on the device using Apple’s Vision framework, uploads no media, and requires no account and no sign-up. On the question that actually worries people — do my photos leave the phone — these two apps make the same claim, and this page will not imply otherwise.

Two edges on that claim sit on MacPaw’s side, and neither should be taken on trust. PhotoBroom’s no-account, no-sign-up position is stated outright; MacPaw’s is inferred, because whether an account is strictly required for the App Store build is strongly implied to be no and never affirmatively stated. And the on-device claim covers analysis as a whole, not each feature individually: whether the AI Organize categorisation and the photo-enhancement feature run entirely on the device is unresolved, because MacPaw says analysis needs no internet connection but publishes no per-feature breakdown, and one does not follow from the other.

The labels are where they part. The CleanMy®Phone US App Store listing declares Identifiers and Usage Data as used to track you, and separately declares an email address, Advertising Data and diagnostics as collected but not linked to the user. PhotoBroom declares no tracking at all. That is not a contradiction of MacPaw’s media claim: Apple’s tracking definition covers linking data with third-party data for advertising and attribution, which is ordinary telemetry for a company with a paid-acquisition funnel. It is worth noting that one MacPaw knowledge-base sentence — that the app does not collect or transfer personal data to any servers by any means — reads broader than the declared label supports. The fair characterisation is that the marketing language is wider than the label, not that anyone is misrepresenting anything.

The two apps mean different things by clutter

CleanMy®Phone covers more of the phone; PhotoBroom covers more of the photo library. PhotoBroom ships seven purpose-built categories — Similar Photos, Swipe to Clean, Screenshots, Low Scored Photos, Screen Recordings, Large Videos with a configurable size threshold, and Short Videos — and stops at the library edge. CleanMy®Phone’s Declutter module covers duplicates, similar photos, blurred shots, screenshots and largest videos, then keeps going well past photos into contacts, a device health score, storage analytics and a network speed test.

On reach, PhotoBroom ships 22 in-app languages across 30 App Store locales, against the 12 languages declared on the CleanMy®Phone US listing.

Which thresholds you can move

PhotoBroom exposes them. Vision aesthetics sensitivity is adjustable, utility and document captures can be included or excluded with a toggle, and the large-video size threshold is configurable, so what counts as clutter is a setting and not a verdict. MacPaw documents no user-tunable equivalent, and long-time users have reported that customisation options they valued were removed during the move from Gemini Photos.

What each app does with a decision to keep

PhotoBroom records it. The Kept list means a photo you have already defended stays defended and is not re-litigated on every rescan, and the decision can be revisited later on your own terms. Nothing equivalent surfaced anywhere in CleanMy®Phone’s documentation.

That absence is doing load-bearing work in this comparison, so it deserves stating precisely: no Kept-style reversibility list was found in anything MacPaw publishes, which is why this page says nothing equivalent surfaced — not that none exists. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and a feature MacPaw shipped but never wrote up would look exactly like this from the outside.

When should you pick CleanMy®Phone instead?

When your storage problem is video-shaped rather than duplicate-shaped and you do not want to delete anything. CleanMy®Phone compresses videos and converts Live Photos to stills, reclaiming gigabytes while keeping every memory. PhotoBroom can only help you delete, so someone sitting on a library of 4K footage they refuse to part with is genuinely better served by MacPaw, and no amount of category counting changes that.

Four more cases go the same way. If you want your library semantically organised into Travel, People, Pets and Food — a browsing aid, not just a smaller library — CleanMy®Phone’s Organize module does that and PhotoBroom does nothing of the kind. If you want device health, security and network dashboards in the same app, the Health module is there and free for everyone. If you already pay for Setapp, CleanMy®Phone is included, so the marginal cost of trying it is nothing. And if your iPhone cannot run iOS 18, PhotoBroom will not install at all, while the CleanMy®Phone listing states iOS 17.0.

MacPaw contradicts itself on that last number, so check it on the device before you rely on it: the App Store listing showed iOS 17.0 while macpaw.com still stated iOS 16.0. If your iPhone is stuck on iOS 16, which of those two is true decides whether you have one option here or none.

This page compares the two apps head to head. If you have already decided to leave CleanMy®Phone and the question is which of several apps to move to, the wider field — including what nothing here replaces — is in CleanMy®Phone alternatives.