Phenquestions
Gallery Doctor - Phone Cleaner is a free application for Android device that promises to go through your digital photo collection on the device to separate good from bad free up space in the process
I guess it is fair to say that most smartphone users use their phones to take photos. It does not really matter if the default camera is used or if an app like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook or QuickPic are being used.
Not every snapshot is a master piece and if you go through your gallery manually you may find some or lots of photos there that are bad. These photos may be blurry or too dark, you may see your thumb on them or they may show the inside of your pockets for example.
The idea behind Gallery Doctor - Phone Cleaner is to list all these bad photos so that you can remove them from the device after verifying that they are indeed bad or not wanted.
The app goes through all photos on the device on start. Since it analyzes each photo individually it may take some time before results are displayed. It took more than five minutes on a Moto G 1st generation device with 1089 photos stored on it.
Photos are rated automatically in the process with bad, similar and photos for review making up the three groups that the app wants you to look at.
You can tap on any group to review photos of that group or on the review and clean button which lets you do so for all three groups at once.
If you are in a hurry, it may make sense to go through the bad and similar photo groups only to remove most or even all photos from the device.
Photos rated as bad by the app are too dark or blurry or of poor quality. Similar images on the other hand refers to multiple versions of the same scenery or object.
Most bad photos on the test device were black with some screenshots of apps thrown into the mix. A "best photo" of a group of similar photos is always shown which may help you in the removal process.
The app marks all other photos of a group automatically so that you can remove all of them with a single tap.
Probably the most interesting group is the review and clean group. Here you need to make decisions for photos individually to keep them or not. The app uses machine learning to get better in identifying photos that you don't want to keep and those that you want to keep based on your selection in the process.
Bad files identified by the app were indeed bad but it did miss a couple that I'd consider bad as well. I had a couple of blurry and too dark photos for instance which it did not identify as bad nor as review worthy.
The main question is if you need an app like Gallery Doctor to assist in removing bad and similar photos from your Android device. It is certainly helpful in this regard even though I'm not convinced that it is necessarily faster than going through the image collection manually if you add the initial scan time the app needs to assess all images on the device.
If you like the assistance that the app provides and take photos regularly, then it may be useful to you. If you go through each photo individually anyway, then it may not except for the fact that it may speed up the review process for pictures in the bad and similar photo group (via Caschy).
