Show HN: macOS app PhotoSort could help reduce your monthly iCloud bill | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: macOS app PhotoSort could help reduce your monthly iCloud bill

6 pointsAppInitio15 comments

PhotoSort does two simple things that Apple Photos (deliberately?) doesn't.

It sorts your iCloud and Mac Photos library by file size and aesthetic quality.

This lets you find not just your best photos, but also large, unwanted photos and videos filling up your iCloud storage, and the hundreds of useless screenshots and forgettable photos cluttering up your Photos library.

PhotoSort creates two albums in the Photos app: SizeSort and QualitySort. The first identifies the biggest space hogs that you could offload to reduce storage; the second separates your best shots from the mediocre and rubbish ones that you might want to delete.

PhotoSort is available on the Mac App Store (https://apps.apple.com/app/id6739038077). The free version reveals your 30 largest files. The paid version ($5 for lifetime use) shows the full sorting and creates the two albums. More details at www.photosort-app.com.

PhotoSort is available in English, French, German, Spanish (ES), Spanish (MX) and Russian versions. The feedback from users has been fantastic, and the app reached #54 in the Mac App Store's Photos & Videos chart last week.

A reviewer (See below) called PhotoSort "The $5 solution Apple hopes you’ll never discover". I do hope you discover it!

Link to review: https://medium.com/macoclock/meet-photosort-the-mac-app-that....

I would appreciate your feedback, and also suggestions for other 'sorts' you'd like to see in the app. Thanks!

Image capture has been able to sort images by size since 2009 for free.

I’ve been cleaning up my pictures that was since the iPhone 3GS

Congrats on moving up the App Store list. Good marketing will still make you money even though there is a free solution to the problem people are trying to solve

Image Capture? It only captures images from devices like iPhone or DSLR cameras. As far as I know it has no sorting capability, and it also can't interrogate the Mac or iCloud Photos library - so how would it sort it?

Great idea! unfortunately it doesn't want process despite giving it access to my library: "PhotoSort cannot access the library. Quit Photos and try again."

let me know how I can solve this in order to become a customer.

Sure. As the alert says: Quit Photos. PhotoSort gets file size and other data from the same database that powers Apple's Photos app, so (in order to preserve its integrity) Photos 'locks' the database when it's using it. Closing Photos will solve the issue. Please confirm once it's resolved (or if you still can't).

Apologies if I was not clear: I obviously followed the prompt and quit the app several times before deciding to reply to your message. It's still giving me the same message.

Sorry about this: Very unusual. If the app can't access the library, presumably the 3+3 thumbnails on Home screen and the Top-30 report in View menu are also blank? Please reboot the Mac and try; if even that doesn't help please email us via the app mentioning your macOS version, so we can troubleshoot step by step.

Seems like a pending OSX update was the case; prior to that I rebooted twice and it wasn't working, after updating OSX it worked :-)

Yay! If you find the app useful, please do rate it on the App Store - that's the only way indie developers can gain some visibility. Thanks.

It sounds good, but why restrict it only to Apple? Couldn't it support other cloud providers? Seems like a waste of codebase.

The code and the Apple framework it uses unfortunately can't be used for, e.g. Windows apps.

In the free version, how do I do anything but look at the 3x3 preview images?

Guess I asked to soon. I looked in the menu bar and and clicked on SizeSort Largest Files. Should put a button or link on the home page since all the other options to click are on there as well.

Thanks, we will. The pop-up message after sorting does say that you can view the Top-30 via View menu, but most folks (us included) click OK without reading it :)

How do you identify quality? Are you sending the photos off my device?

Nope, everything is done locally on the device itself. Every item in the library is scored on various parameters e.g. composition, lighting, focus, color scheme etc. and the final ranking is based on a weighted average of these.

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