Afterglow
Currently in pre-submission with the App Store. This page is a preview — the listing will go live once it ships.
Why this exists#
Photo libraries quietly grow into a weight you stop wanting to look at. The screenshots, the duplicates, the failed shots, the once-bright moments that now feel heavy — they pile up. Deleting them one by one feels both tedious and slightly sad, so most people don’t. Afterglow was built for that hesitation. It turns letting go into a calm, deliberate act, then quietly turns the act of release into something that grows.
The app has a single thesis: you don’t have to fight forgetting. Let it become a garden you can walk through.
Three Acts: Triage, Grace, Garden#
Afterglow is shaped as three tabs, mirrored after a three-act narrative. You don’t have to use them in order, but most sessions naturally pass through all three.
Triage#
A card-stack swipe. Left to forget, right to keep, up to favorite. The Vision framework quietly skips blurs and burst duplicates so the rhythm stays calm — you’re not punished by a wall of near-identical RAW shots from a single afternoon. Smart Sort surfaces similar, blurry, or overexposed shots first, so the early swipes feel productive without feeling brutal.
Grace#
A 7-day grace period. Photos you swipe away don’t disappear right away — recall any of them with a long press. After the 7 days, iOS’s Recently Deleted album then gives you another 30 days, so 37 days of room to change your mind. Grace exists because letting go shouldn’t be irreversible. It is the breath between “I think I’m done with this” and “yes, really.”
Garden#
What you truly release blooms as a 3D abandoned-amusement-park ecosystem. Cool light becomes moss; warm light becomes flowers; high-energy frames become fireflies. Each plant is a quiet farewell. You can walk the garden, watch the seasons shift, and share a composed image of it to keep — without keeping the original photos.
What the ML actually does (and doesn’t)#
The ✦ icon on the Triage tab is Smart Sort: a local pass over the oldest 200 unreviewed photos, ranked by “likely to delete” descending. Settings exposes two more entries — Similar Photos (perceptual clusters, e.g. 127 burst frames of the same newborn pose) and Browse by Scene (coarse buckets: people, food, animal, landscape, document, other).
All three run on Apple’s Vision framework: image classification, face capture quality, text detection, and feature print embeddings — the same neural nets Photos.app uses internally. On top, Afterglow layers a small, transparent weighted formula: screenshots, blur, age, and burst non-heroes add points; favorites and sharp human faces subtract them; photos belonging to a near-duplicate cluster get an extra nudge if they’re not the cluster’s best frame. Simple, auditable, no black magic.
In all honesty:
- For raw classification quality, Apple wins. Photos.app has facial identity clustering, natural-language search, places, and curated memory montages. Our six scene buckets are not in the same league.
- What Apple doesn’t do is hand you a curated deletion queue. Their Duplicates album and Screenshots album exist, but you have to go look. Afterglow surfaces deletion candidates proactively as a swipeable queue, wrapped in a 7-day grace period, redeemed by the garden.
- You decide. ML only ranks — the swipe is always your finger. Anything you send away enters the 7-day grace; after that, iOS Recently Deleted keeps it for 30 more days. Three layers of recall.
Curious how a single photo gets scored? A developer toggle in Settings — “Show analysis info” — surfaces the formula breakdown under each thumbnail (screen +0.30, blur ×0.18, face quality ×0.92, …). It’s the layer Apple never lets you see, and Afterglow is quietly fond of letting you peek.
Why on-device#
Afterglow is 100% on-device. Every Vision analysis, SwiftData write, and 3D render happens on your iPhone. There is no network, no account, no third-party SDK, no analytics, no advertising ID, no telemetry. Your photos never leave your device. We can’t see what you tossed; iCloud doesn’t see it either.
This isn’t a feature. It is the architectural posture of the app. A cleanup tool earns trust by handling sensitive content with as few external moving parts as possible — so we removed all of them.
What grows in the garden#
The garden has 11 archetypes, unlocking gradually as the diversity of your released photos grows:
- Moss — cool, blue-shifted scenes
- Mushroom — low-light or shadowy frames
- Flower — warm, saturated palettes
- Vine — long-form sequences and panoramas
- Firefly — high-energy, motion-rich shots
- Butterfly — colorful, cheerful frames
- Fruit tree — densely populated scenes
- Paper — text-heavy screenshots
- Scrap — failed exposures, technical misfires
- Statue — portrait-shaped compositions
- Wild grass — anything else
Each is a tiny codex entry, a reminder that what you released wasn’t worthless — it was just done.
Quiet farewell#
Afterglow is hobbyist software, written for one person at a time. There is no leaderboard, no streak, no notification asking you to come back. The seasonal recap will tell you what colors your spring or autumn had, and that’s it. You don’t have to fight forgetting. Let it be a garden you can walk through.