Too many photos of my kids
Nobody takes one photograph of a two-year-old. You take four, because three of them will be a blur and one might be the one. Then you never look at the other three again, and you do it several times a week for a decade. That is the whole mechanism, and it is not a discipline problem — taking four was the right call every single time.
What it adds up to
One number, from the library this app was built against: 31,753 photographs. On a smaller reference set of 88 of those, taken from ordinary family moments, the app would offer 40 — about 45% — as safe to let go. That is one person's library rather than a survey, but it is the right order of magnitude for anyone whose photographs are mostly of the same few faces.
Roughly half of a family photo library is versions of the other half.
Storage is the symptom, not the complaint
Every tool in this category sells you gigabytes, and the gigabytes are real. They are also not what is actually bothering you, or you would have bought more iCloud storage years ago and stopped thinking about it.
What you lost is the ability to look through your own photographs. Scrolling a year of a child's life means scrolling eight versions of every afternoon, and the good one is in there somewhere. So the album for the grandparents does not get made, the birthday slideshow gets made from whatever was on the phone that week, and the yearbook has been a someday-project for three years — because the slow part was never choosing the good photographs. It was wading through the versions of each one.
What to do that costs nothing
Do these first. They are free, they are built in, and for some libraries they are enough.
- The Duplicates album, in Photos under Utilities. It clears genuine copies safely — merging leaves one original and the rest wait 30 days in Recently Deleted. It will not touch four separate exposures of one moment, because those are four different photographs.
- Open your bursts. Each one is a single stacked item holding many frames. Make a Selection lets you save the good frames as individual photos and send the rest to Recently Deleted. Slow, but it is where the largest single wins are.
- Favourite the ones that matter, as you go. This is the highest-value habit on the page and it costs a tap. It makes the good photographs findable, and it marks them for every tool you might ever run — any that is worth running will leave a favourite alone.
- Make the album now, not later. Fifteen photographs in a named album is worth more in ten years than thirty thousand in a timeline, and it protects them at the same time.
Where a tool helps
What none of the above does is go through fifteen thousand near-identical shots and pick one from each moment. That is the part worth handing over, and it is all Photosteward does.
It groups the shots that belong to one moment and keeps one of them. When there are faces in the group it weighs those first — eyes open, everyone smiling, more faces clearly visible — and then framing and sharpness. A group with nobody in it is judged on the picture alone. Every photograph it sets aside carries the reason in plain language, and one keystroke keeps a different one instead.
It gets this wrong sometimes, and the honest number is published: on the reference corpus it chose the same photograph as the person in 25 of the 30 groups where a winner had been named. The other five are listed in the repository beside the reasons the person gave — “framing, subject in centre”, “more friendly faces” — and two of them turn on something the app cannot currently see at all. Treat 25 of 30 as a floor from one family's photographs, not a promise about yours.
Nothing is moved or changed while it decides. The photographs it flags sit in an album until you press the button; then macOS asks once more with its own dialog, and what you delete waits 30 days in Recently Deleted. Favourites and anything in your own albums are never flagged.
These are photographs of your children
Which makes one question more important than any of the rest: what actually happens to the faces?
Photosteward detects faces, counts them, and measures how each one was captured — open eyes, a smile, how clearly the face is visible in the frame. It never works out who anyone is. There is no recognition, no names, no face database, and nothing that could become one. The counting exists for a narrow reason: three photographs taken thirty seconds apart can look almost identical to a computer and be three separate moments to you, and the number of people in each is what tells them apart.
All of it happens on your Mac, using Apple's own on-device frameworks. There is no account and no upload — your files never leave your Mac. What does leave is small and listed in full on the privacy page: anonymous usage counts as coarse buckets, which you can switch off, and a check for updates. Never a photo, a face, a name, a place or a date.
Questions
Does it recognise my children?
No, and the distinction matters. It detects that there are faces, counts them, and measures how each one was captured — whether the eyes are open, whether the person is smiling, how clearly the face is visible. It never works out who anyone is. There is no recognition, no names, and nothing resembling a face database; the counting exists only so that two different moments photographed seconds apart do not get merged into one group.
Will it decide a photo I loved should go?
It can, and it will sometimes be wrong — on the reference corpus it picked a different photograph from the person in five of thirty groups. That is why nothing it decides is final on its own. It sets photos aside in an album where you can look at all of them, every one carries the reason it was flagged, and one keystroke keeps a different photo instead. A favourite, or anything already filed in one of your own albums, is never flagged at all.
Should I back up before running something like this?
Yes — before running anything that touches a photo library, this app included. Not because the answer depends on it: nothing is removed until you press the button, macOS asks once more with its own dialog, and deleted photos wait 30 days in Recently Deleted. But a family library is not the place to find out that a backup would have been sensible.
What about the photos that are already in albums?
They are left alone. Putting a photo in an album, or marking it a favourite, is a decision you already made, and the app treats it as one — it keeps the photo and says so in its own words: “Already in one of your albums”.
What Photosteward does, in full · Why the Duplicates album misses these · Picking the best frame of a burst · Download Photosteward 0.1.2 — free to try