Blanc vs Swipewipe: an honest comparison of two swipe photo cleaners

Published 2026-09-06

Swipewipe is the most polished swipe cleaner on the App Store — tens of thousands of ratings, a big team behind it, a feature list that keeps growing. Blanc is a small app built by one person. This page is written by Blanc's developer, so read it knowing that. The comparison sticks to what you can verify on both App Store pages, and it says plainly where Swipewipe is the better pick.

The short version

Choose Swipewipe if you want cleaning to feel like a game with a nostalgia layer on top: month-by-month sessions, an "On This Day" feed with streaks, a map of where your photos were taken, AI enhancement for old shots, and automatic spotting of similar photos, blurry shots and screenshots.
Choose Blanc if you want one job done with no theatre: go through the whole library once, with a hard guarantee that a photo you've already judged never comes back — in ten-minute sessions over weeks, on a new phone too.
Both are swipe cleaners. The real difference is what each app thinks the hard part is: Swipewipe thinks it's motivation, Blanc thinks it's memory.

What Swipewipe does better

Rediscovery. "On This Day", a home-screen widget, a world map of your photos. If half the appeal of cleaning is bumping into old memories, Swipewipe is built for that and Blanc isn't.
Automatic detection. Swipewipe flags similar photos, blurry shots and screenshots for you. Blanc deliberately doesn't detect anything — you make the calls. (For exact duplicates, the free Duplicates album in iOS Photos already does the job.)
AI enhancement. Swipewipe can sharpen old low-quality photos. Blanc has no editing features at all.
Polish and scale. Tens of thousands of ratings and a team shipping updates constantly. Blanc's user base is a rounding error next to that.

What Blanc does better

Memory you can rely on. Blanc ties every decision to the photo's permanent system identifier. Keep or delete, that photo is gone from your queue for good — across sessions, and since version 1.8 across phones via iCloud. Month-by-month sessions are a good way to *start*; memory is what lets you *finish* a 20,000-photo library without re-judging the same screenshot in week three.
No motivation mechanics. No streaks, no daily nudges, no widget asking you to come back. You open it when you have ten minutes, it shows you the next photo you haven't seen. That's the whole loop.
A calmer deletion flow. Nothing is deleted mid-swipe. Decisions collect on a review screen, you confirm once, and everything still goes through iOS's Recently Deleted — 30 days to change your mind.
Nothing leaves your phone. No account, no server, no upload. Photos are read on-device and that's where the records stay.

Pricing

Both apps are free to download and unlock full use with a subscription, so check the current plans on each store page before deciding — pricing in this category changes often. Blanc's terms are simple: your first 20 photos are free, then monthly or yearly, with a 7-day free trial on the yearly plan and no ads at any tier. The question worth asking about any subscription cleaner is how long the job will take you: if you'll finish in a weekend, a month of either app is plenty; if you'll chip away over months, memory is what stops the subscription from paying for repeated work.

Requirements

Swipewipe requires iOS 18. Blanc runs on iOS 17 or later, which still covers a fair number of older iPhones.

A fair way to decide

Ask yourself what stalls your cleanups. If you stop because it's boring, Swipewipe's streaks and memory lane are designed to fix exactly that. If you stop because every session starts with the same wall of photos you already looked at, that's a memory problem, and it's the only problem Blanc set out to solve.

Weighing other options too? See our tested list of the best photo cleaner apps for iPhone, or the Blanc vs Cleanup comparison if duplicate detection is your main concern.