Clean out your camera roll like it's a dating app.

Yes, and deliberately not in one step. Nothing is deleted while you swipe — swiping only builds a list. When you confirm the batch, your phone shows its own system delete dialog, and that dialog is the only thing that can actually remove a photo. We cannot bypass it and we did not try to. Confirmed photos go to Recently Deleted on iOS and to the Trash on Android.

For 30 days, yes. Recently Deleted (iOS) and Trash (Android) hold your photos for 30 days, and you can restore anything from there in the Photos or Gallery app. After 30 days the operating system removes them permanently. One thing we will not fudge: your storage is not fully reclaimed until you empty Recently Deleted or the Trash yourself. No app can do that for you, ours included. Time To Swipe tells you how much space is queued to be freed and reminds you to empty the trash to actually get it back.

Yes. Reviewing, filtering, undoing and deleting are all local, so airplane mode changes nothing about any of them. Our own network use is one small call — a settings file — and if it fails the app carries on with its built-in defaults and says nothing about it; the free swipes every install starts with are issued by the app itself, so they need no connection either. The free tier’s ads need a connection, so offline you simply see none, and nothing else changes. A paid tier, once bought, is remembered on the device.

The free tier does. Three ad networks supply them, tried in order — Start.io, Google AdMob and Unity Ads: a banner on the swipe screen, an interstitial after you confirm a deletion batch or when the deck runs out, and an optional rewarded video worth 100 more swipes whenever you run out, as often as you like. Ads are non-personalised for everyone: every network is told before it serves anything that you have not agreed to personalised advertising. Where the law requires it — the EEA, the UK, Switzerland and several US states — the app also shows Google’s consent prompt, because Google will not serve any ad there without one; whatever you answer, personalisation stays off, and a Privacy options entry in Settings lets you change the answer later. No network ever receives a photo, a thumbnail, an EXIF field or anything about what you kept or deleted. The paid tiers remove ads and stop the ad SDKs from running at all.

Twenty-five, shipped at launch: English, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Swedish. Arabic and Hebrew get a fully mirrored right-to-left layout, not just translated text.

Small, and staying that way. We hold ourselves to a hard ceiling of 15 MB to download on iPhone and 10 MB on Android, and current builds sit well under both. There are no bundled fonts, no icon packs and no image assets beyond the app icon itself — every icon in the app is drawn in code.

Yes. Videos appear in the deck alongside photos, and because a video is usually the single largest item in a camera roll, they are often where the space actually is. You can also filter the deck down to videos only — or to screenshots, selfies, bursts, panoramas, Live Photos and more — and clear one category at a time.