One of the iPhone’s cleverest features is its ability to take a screenshot of the device just by holding down two buttons. I take screenshots every day, of all kinds of things: errant tweets that I know are about to be deleted, mobile boarding passes for a flight home, or images from the web that I might want to share in a story or on social media. The problem is that these screenshots are useful for about 24 hours — but I never go back to delete them, because iOS doesn’t offer a way to sort through them. Screenshots are the main reason my camera roll looks so cluttered.
Screeny is the screenshot-deleting iPhone app we have wanted all our lives
There’s never been an easier way to clean up your camera roll
There’s never been an easier way to clean up your camera roll
is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.
Enter Screeny, a new $0.99 app that makes deleting screenshots a breeze. You simply open the app, tap to scan your camera roll, and select the screenshots you want to get rid of. Screeny lets you know how much space you will recover on your phone; tap one more time, and they all disappear. About the only way Screeny could be better (aside from iPad compatibility) is if it offered to delete your screenshots automatically after a certain amount of time.
Screeny wasn’t possible until iOS 8, when new APIs gave developers the ability to delete photos. In the grand scheme of things, useless old screenshots are a fairly minor concern. But they are also something that have bugged me every day since I bought an iPhone. So to NFN Labs, which makes the app, we offer our sincere thanks. Sometimes it’s the simplest utilities that make us the happiest.
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