Free Up Phone Space with Gemini Photos
Jason B. Jones
Building from the maxim that the best camera is the one you have with you, the camera(s) on any smartphone is one of its most important features. In addition to taking pictures of pets, loved ones, scenery, and lunch, folks also use their phones' cameras to remember things–where you parked, a scrap of text, a gift you wanted to buy . . . basically anything that the camera's sensor will register. And with a digital camera the way to get a great picture is to take a ton of pictures, and pick the best one. All of those practices, however, mean that there's probably a decent amount of "junk" in your phone's camera roll: parking spaces that no longer matter; lunches long since Instagrammed, and 14 pictures of the same group of friends (with only 1 where no one's blinking). And who has time to go through your phone and delete that stuff? Yet the file size of images has increased faster than the memory configuration of the base model of most phones, so many of us find ourselves running up against storage limits. Wouldn't it be great if someone would go through and identify all the likely junk, and give you options for deleting? Friends, Gemini Photos is that 'someone': The app uses some basic machine learning rules to look for: similar photos, blurry photos, screenshots, notes, and other similar things that were probably a good idea once but now can go. It's really fast, as well! Here's a screenshot from about 3 seconds after launching the app: 
Nifty! The "Similar" pile is pretty self-explanatory, while "Clutter" decomposes into Blurred, Notes, and Screenshots. It then gives you options for deleting unnecessary photos or for excluding certain results from the analysis. For similar photos, it even offers a suggestion about which one is best and then offers to delete the others. (Of course you can make a different choice.) For people with older phones, or just ones with a smaller amount of memory, Gemini Photos might well be a lifesaver. And it keeps your photos on your phone–nothing goes out to any server somewhere (*Google*). It does cost: After a 3 day grace period, you have to pay $2.99/month, or $11.99/yr, or $21.99 for forever. That said, if you routinely take tons of photos, it's not a bad investment. I almost never take just one photo of any living thing, since it's just as easy to take several. And I love to take screenshots that then get reused elsewhere (see above!). Gemini Photos is thus great for me–and maybe for you as well! Do you have a favorite way to manage a bloated smartphone camera roll? Let us know in comments! Photo "Pola Love" by Flickr user Ben Seidelman / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0 | 
