Feathy

Photos Aren’t Files — They’re About Your Life
Free Up Space, Keep What Matters

Press kit

Clean Up. Relive. Tuck Away. — facts, assets and what may be quoted.

Some photos are clutter. Some are memories worth rediscovering. And some still matter, even when we don’t want to see them right now. Feathy gives each of them a different place.

iPhone · On-device · No account · No ads · No data collected · One-time purchase

The idea

Most photo-cleaning apps begin with one question: what can you delete?

But a photo library is not only storage. It holds accidental screenshots and blurry shots. It holds moments we have forgotten. And sometimes it holds people, places or periods of our lives that we want to keep without seeing every day.

Feathy was built around three different decisions.

Clean Up — clear what no longer matters

Finds duplicates, similar shots, blurry photos, screenshots, large videos and storage-heavy Live Photos. A large video can be compressed instead of deleted, keeping its date and its HDR. A Live Photo can become a still when the motion no longer matters.

Before anything is removed, Feathy shows the exact items and the exact space that can be reclaimed. Deletion goes through Apple’s own Photos confirmation, so anything removed waits 30 days in Recently Deleted.

Relive — rediscover what still matters

Relive brings back one photo from this day in earlier years, chosen on the device. The goal is not only to remove old photos. Sometimes the right action is to see one again.

Tuck Away — keep it, just don’t see it right now

Some memories are not clutter, but we may not want them turning up in an everyday photo library. Tuck Away gathers photos connected to a person, a date range or a place and puts them in the iPhone’s own Hidden album, out of everyday view, under a name you choose.

The photos remain yours. You decide when you are ready to see them again.

Quick facts

Why the name

Feathy comes from feather. Make a photo library feel lighter without forcing anyone to let go of what still matters. That principle shaped the product and the way it is sold: Feathy reduces digital weight without treating every memory as something that has to disappear.

Privacy, by design

A photo library holds some of the most personal information on a phone. Feathy was built around a deliberate constraint: managing your own photos should not require uploading them to someone else’s server.

• No account system
• No Feathy server
• No advertising SDK
• No analytics SDK
• No tracking framework
• No photo upload pipeline
• No collected user data

Photo analysis runs on the iPhone.

The privacy claim, and how to check it

We would rather hand over the technical detail than ask anyone to take a privacy claim on trust. The shipping app contains no URLSession at all — not one networking call in the source — no third-party SDK of any kind, and no Feathy backend. Two details are worth explaining before someone finds them.

iCloud photo downloads

Many iPhone owners use Optimise iPhone Storage, so the full-resolution copy of a photo may live in their own iCloud library rather than on the device. When Feathy needs that photo, Apple’s PhotoKit downloads it from the user’s own iCloud library to the user’s own iPhone. That traffic is iCloud → iPhone, not iPhone → Feathy.

Feathy links Apple’s Network framework for one purpose: to ask whether the phone is on Wi-Fi, so those downloads don’t quietly spend cellular data. It opens no connection of its own.

Face matching

Tuck Away can gather photos of a particular person. Face matching uses AuraFace-v1 by fal, licensed under Apache 2.0. The model is bundled inside the app and runs on the phone, behind a consent screen the person has to tap. Face representations stay on the device, are excluded from backups, are never sent to Feathy, and are deleted when the feature is switched off. The model licence ships inside the app.

What makes Feathy different

Feathy includes familiar tools. Duplicate detection exists elsewhere. So does blur detection. So does video compression. The difference is not a claim that each tool is new — it is the model that connects them.

Three different decisions, rather than reducing a whole photo library to keep or delete.

Trade-offs we are open about

A press kit that only explains where a product looks good is not much use. These are the current trade-offs.

Apple Photos already finds exact duplicates

Apple provides duplicate detection inside Photos at no cost, and anyone should try that first. Feathy’s Clean Up is broader — duplicates alongside similar shots, blurry photos, screenshots, large videos and Live Photos — but duplicate detection itself is not unique to us.

The upfront price is significant

$69.99 in the US, 79,99 € in France. That is more expensive on day one than a low-priced weekly subscription. Our choice is to charge once rather than build the product around recurring billing. We do not print competitors’ prices, because we have found four contradictory figures for one of them and will not repeat a number we cannot stand behind.

Blur detection can be wrong

Blur is partly subjective, and Feathy’s detection has not yet been calibrated against a large labelled set, so a sharp or deliberately soft photograph can be flagged. Nothing is deleted without the user selecting it.

Tucked-away photos are restored in Photos

iOS gives no app a supported way to un-hide a photo, so Feathy cannot undo a tuck from inside itself. Restoring happens in Apple Photos. We would rather state that than imply an interaction iOS does not allow.

Press assets

A 59-second demo — recorded on a real 10,750-item library, no music, no captions, no staging.

Screenshots: Clean Up (reclaimable storage and categories) · Similar Photos · Large Videos (compress and keep) · Relive · Tuck Away. Plus the app icon, the logo and landscape editorial visuals. Full-resolution originals on request.

Review access

Journalists and reviewers are welcome to full Feathy Pro access. Apple does not issue App Store promo codes until the app and its in-app purchase are approved; the moment they are, we will send a code on request — you should not have to ask twice.

For editors

Press contact

QIN Qin, creator of Feathy — hello.feathy@outlook.com