PhotoBroom vs Slidebox: Detection or Album Filing

Slidebox files photos. PhotoBroom finds them.

PhotoBroom and Slidebox take opposite halves of the same problem. PhotoBroom scans on the device with Apple’s Vision framework, clusters near-duplicates by feature print, scores photos for quality, and sorts what it finds into seven categories: Similar Photos, Swipe to Clean, Screenshots, Low Scored Photos, Screen Recordings, Large Videos with a configurable size threshold, and Short Videos. Slidebox performs no automatic detection whatsoever. It shows one photo at a time and asks a person to decide, and its distinguishing move is that a keeper can be dropped into an existing album with a single tap on the way past.

Read the album-filing column of the table first. It settles more of this comparison than the other three together, because it is the only column where one app has something the other cannot approximate at all — and the app holding it is Slidebox.

Which app files photos into albums?

Slidebox does, PhotoBroom does not, and this is the one comparison where the answer is not close. Slidebox’s album organiser lets you tap the photo currently on screen straight into an existing album without leaving the triage flow, so a single pass through twelve years of photos can both empty the clutter and file the keepers. PhotoBroom has no album assignment in any form: photos you keep stay exactly where they were in the Photos library, and PhotoBroom’s only record of the decision is its Kept list.

If filing is the job, this comparison ends here and Slidebox is the answer.

Which app finds duplicate and similar photos automatically?

PhotoBroom does. Its Similar Photos category runs Apple Vision feature prints on the device to cluster near-identical shots — burst frames, retries of the same pose, the four versions of one sunset — comparing photos taken within a configurable time window of each other, five minutes by default.

Slidebox has no automatic detection at all. Its “Compare Similar Photos” is a manual comparison of adjacent frames, and users have reported buying premium specifically expecting duplicate grouping and not finding it. Whether that feature has any automatic component was not verified by running the app, so it is described here as the reviews describe it.

How is each app funded, and what does the free version give you?

PhotoBroom locks nothing. Every category is open and every scan result is fully visible without paying; what is metered is deletion, 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 the allowance. Pro removes the daily cap and adds Auto-Process All Groups, and is sold on yearly and weekly cadences as well as a one-time lifetime purchase. Slidebox is free to install and its free tier is ad-funded, with premium sold either as a subscription or as a one-time permanent unlock — an option reviewers repeatedly name as their reason for choosing it.

Read the table as a description of what each free tier costs you when it is not costing money.

What do the two apps’ privacy documents actually say?

What each vendor commits to in writing

PhotoBroom’s statement is short and testable: your photos and videos are analysed on your device and are never uploaded, there is no account and there is no sign-up. Slidebox makes no equivalent claim anywhere, and that silence is the story. Its privacy policy, last updated 24 August 2024, states that the information “may be uploaded to the Company’s servers and/or a Service Provider’s server or it may be simply stored on Your device” — a permission the vendor reserved, which is not the same as evidence that it happens, and it should not be read as more than that. The policy also names Google Analytics, Firebase, Mixpanel and AdMob among its third-party services.

Slidebox’s App Store privacy label is comparatively mild. Everything declared falls under Data Not Linked to You — third-party advertising, analytics and diagnostics, plus User Content including Photos or Videos for app functionality — with no Data Used to Track You category declared at all.

The documents that were never updated

One complication sits underneath all of that. Slidebox retired its optional photo backup service on 1 February 2026, but neither the privacy policy nor the iOS FAQ was updated afterwards, so both still describe an account-based cloud service with phone-number verification and server-side encryption that no longer ships. The store description carries the same problem: it still advertises extra photo capacity and album cloud storage for a product that has been switched off.

So the most recent thing Slidebox has published about your photos describes an app that no longer exists.

Which devices and iOS versions does each app support?

Slidebox reaches further, though by less than the two platform lists suggest. Its App Store listing covers iPhone, iPad, Apple silicon Mac and Apple Vision, with minimums of iOS and iPadOS 15.0, macOS 12.0 and visionOS 1.0, and there is a separate Android build on Google Play. PhotoBroom lists the same four Apple platforms — it runs on an Apple silicon Mac and on Apple Vision Pro as the iPad app, against that machine’s own Photos library — so the two real gaps are Android and any iPhone below iOS 18. On an iPhone Apple has stopped updating, PhotoBroom will not install and Slidebox will.

PhotoBroom’s counter-fact is narrow: 22 in-app languages across 30 App Store locales, against Slidebox’s 15 App Store languages.

Which one should you install?

The deciding question is not which app is better. It is what you intend to do with the photos you keep.

If you intend to file them — one pass through twelve years, each keeper landing in the right album, the rest deleted on the way past — install Slidebox and stop reading here. PhotoBroom has nothing at all to offer that job. The same answer holds if you distrust automated culling and want to look at every image yourself, if you need the same tool on Android or on an iPhone still running iOS 15, 16 or 17, or if a decade of shipping since 2015 and a decade of mainstream press are the kind of track record you weigh. PhotoBroom matches none of that.

If the keepers are simply going to stay where they are, the question becomes volume, and 30,000 photos will not be looked at one at a time by anybody. That is the case PhotoBroom is built for: Vision clustering does the finding, seven categories cover the specific shapes of clutter that eat storage — screenshots, screen recordings, oversized videos — and Pro’s Auto-Process All Groups resolves entire similar groups in one batch. It is also the answer if advertising inside a cleanup app is a dealbreaker, or if you want an explicit on-device statement about your media rather than a policy that reserves the right to upload.

One honest limit on that side: 50 items a day is a slow way through a 20,000-photo backlog if you never buy Pro.

What Slidebox does not document

The unresolved parts of this comparison all sit on one side of it. Slidebox has never claimed that photo analysis happens on the device, its policy reserves the right to upload, and since the backup service was retired there is no evidence either way about what the app now does with a photo it is shown — so that question stays open here. Whether a Slidebox account is required today is open for the same reason: the service that used phone-number verification is gone, and the FAQ describing accounts was left standing. The free-tier boundary, meaning which date ranges remain free and which now sit behind premium, is inferred from a consistent cluster of user reports because the developer has documented it nowhere. Wherever reviews and reports are the only source available, this page says so at the point of the claim.

If you are weighing Slidebox against the wider field and not against PhotoBroom specifically, the Slidebox alternatives page splits the options by which job you are trying to finish.