Gemini II Photo Cleanup for iOS: Keep only the best shots

by **bdahm** Wed Jun 26, 2019 10:58 am

One of the great things about digital cameras is that one can economically take a whole lot of pictures. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s a lot of pictures to sort through to find that perfect shot. Since storage space is relatively plentiful and inexpensive, the tendency is just to not spend a lot of time shifting through the photos to get rid of the chaff. Unfortunately when you have to go back into the pile and get that shot you want to send to someone, you’re either going to have to take a lot of time trying to get the right one or you’re going to pick the first one that looks half way good.

If you take a lot of digital photos you are probably familiar with this problem. So what do you do? That means you need to put in a good deal of time in on the front end to whittle down the number of shots you keep. Well, I’m happy to report that there’s a cool app that can help you with this laborious process and save you a good deal of storage space in the process. It’s an iOS app called Gemini Photos II: Gallery Cleaner. I was a little skeptical that it could deliver on picking out the bests shots in a series, but after letting it loose on my Camera Roll I was impressed with how well it did.

When you launch the Gemini II it displays some slices of your photo library. There’s a section that contains the photos that are similar in some way, typically because they were taken of the same scene at the same time, there’s a section for Screenshots, Notes, Blurred, and Other, which contains all the photos in your Camera Roll. Pictures in My Photo Stream and not included in this Other category because they could come from other devices.

The Similar category is the one I have found the most useful, because it contains multiple shots. This collection is broken down by month. For each picture for which there are multiples, it will have chosen what it considers the “Best Result” and it will be marked accordingly. There will be a little circle in the lower right hand corner of the shot signifying this. You can tap the photo to examine it in greater detail or even zoom it. Thumbnails of similar shots are displayed also and you can swipe left to view them. There is a check mark in the lower right hand corner of these shots that you can tap if you decided, for whatever reason, that this is the shot you prefer.

The overall view of each Similar set of shots has thumbnails of all those included. You can choose to Keep All or move all by the one designated Best Result to Trash. There’s an additional Edit icon in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, that is a one-shot enhancement of the image that touches all the bases of exposure, color, contrast, shading, a very nice touch. I found the Best Result selection is the one I would have gone with as high as 90% of the time. There were a couple of times when I chose otherwise because the one person I was interested in looked better in a different shot. The Trash file is separate from your Recently Deleted folder. Photos not selected will, therefore, hang around until you empty the trash and then they remain in the Recently Deleted album for an additional 30 days, so there are plenty of chances to bring those discarded photos back if you need to. If you were really pressed for time and once you are confident of the choices made by Gemini II, you could just elect to Delete All, and only the Best Result photos will be retained and the others go to Trash.

The Screenshots and Notes categories contained far few shots and required more attention to determine just what I wanted and what could be discarded.

All things considered I found Gemini II delivered on what I wanted most, a smart way of eliminating multiple shots of similar photos. You can try the app for free for 72 hours at which time the ability to move photos to trash goes away. If you like what you see, you can purchase the app using several options, a monthly subscription for $2.99/month, an annual subscription for $11.99/year or a one-time purchase for $14.99 offering outright purchase. The other nice thing about this app is that all actions take place on your device. There is no phoning home or processing in the cloud. If you take a lot of pictures, it’s worth taking a look at. You can see screen shots, more details and read other reviews at the link below.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/id1277110040

-Bill