cairn vs Curate Photo

cairn reconciles your iPhone photo library against your own Immich server. When you delete a photo on your phone, cairn moves the matching photo on Immich to Trash. That's the whole job. cairn doesn't upload photos, show albums, edit metadata, or run AI — the Immich app already does those things. cairn closes the one loop the Immich app doesn't: photos that live on the server after you've deleted them from your phone. HOW IT WORKS — Content identity is SHA1 (the same identifier Immich uses server-side). — cairn subscribes to iOS's deletion log, so it sees soft-deletes as you make them. — A configurable quarantine window holds confirmed deletions before anything moves, so an accidental mass-offload has time to be caught. — Every run shows you the candidate list first. Nothing happens on the server until you confirm. SAFETY MODEL — Trash, not delete. cairn moves assets into your Immich Trash — Immich retains them for 30 days, and restore is one tap. — Percent cap + floor. If a single run would move more than a threshold of your matched photos to Trash, it aborts without touching the server. — Breadcrumbs. Every run is tagged on Immich (cairn/v1/run/[id]) so you can find it server-side. — Forensic journal. Local append-only log records every step — planned, tagged, trashed, restored, failed. — Exclusions. Protect specific photos from ever being flagged. — Indexing scope. Restrict cairn to a specific set of Photos albums. Photos outside the scope are silently ignored — never hashed, never proposed for trash. Useful if you want to manage just one album and leave synced family albums alone. PRIVACY — No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no ads. — No cairn backend. Your iPhone talks directly to your Immich server using your API key. — Credentials stay in the iOS Keychain. Nothing leaves your device besides requests you configured. REQUIREMENTS — An Immich server you run or control. — An Immich API key. cairn requests these scopes: asset.read, asset.view, asset.download, asset.delete, tag.create, tag.asset, tag.read. The Setup screen lists them when you paste your key. cairn is not affiliated with the Immich project. It talks to Immich over its public API; compatibility only. Source is MIT-licensed at github.com/glarue/cairn.

Curate makes cleaning up your photo library fast and a little bit fun. Photos appear one at a time: swipe right to keep, swipe left to put it in your delete pile. Nothing is deleted until you review the pile and confirm. SWIPE THROUGH YOUR LIBRARY • Keep or delete with a swipe, or with the buttons and keyboard shortcuts • Undo your last swipe at any time • Photos, videos and Live Photos play right on the card REVIEW BEFORE YOU DELETE • See everything in your delete pile and how much space it will free • Rescue anything with one tap • Deleted items go to Recently Deleted, so you can recover them for 30 days FIND WHAT TAKES UP SPACE • Filter by screenshots, screen recordings, videos, Live Photos, selfies and more • Sort by largest, oldest, newest, longest or shuffled • Look only at items over a size you choose, or from a period you choose FIND DUPLICATES • Groups near-identical shots taken moments apart • Suggests the best one to keep, you decide AI SUGGESTIONS, ON YOUR DEVICE • On supported devices, Apple Intelligence flags items that look like clutter, such as blurry shots, old screenshots or receipts • Suggestions appear on the cards and can filter or sort your library • Everything is analyzed on your device. Nothing is uploaded. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • No account, no ads, no tracking, no servers • Works with limited photo access if you only want to share some photos • Your progress is stored only on your device Curate needs access to your photo library to show your photos and to delete the ones you choose.