Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

This new Canon photo app will help you decide which pics are worth keeping

With smartphone cameras now so advanced, most of us ditched our compact cameras long ago. The ease with which we can fire up a smartphone camera and take a snap means many of us are now taking a lot of photos. That’s all well and good, but unless you’re a stickler for photo management, you can quickly end up with masses of subpar images that take up a large chunk of your phone’s storage space.

Recommended Videos

With that in mind, Japanese camera giant Canon has come up with a new app for iOS designed to automatically whip your photo library into shape.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Photo Culling uses artificial intelligence to sort through all of the images on your iPhone before suggesting which ones you might want to delete. To separate the wheat from the chaff, Canon’s Computer Vision Artificial Intelligence Engine analyzes four key features of a photo: Sharpness, noise, emotions, and closed eyes. Images that fail to reach a threshold score that you set for each characteristic will be suggested as deletions, with the final decision made, of course, by you.

The app will also suggest deleting duplicate photos, leaving you with the best images from a set.

Photo Culling offers a number of additional features, including photo count and storage space information on the app’s home screen; dynamic albums based on events and dates, with the app automatically surfacing large albums to suggest you review its photos for possible deletion; and dark/light mode options.

“In today’s ever-changing and overwhelming world, where thousands of photos are captured and stored in a person’s smartphone, consumers need an expert, reliable, and intuitive photo tool to help them decide the best photos based on years of trusted knowledge and technology,” Canon USA’s Tatsuro Kano said in a release. “Canon’s new Photo Culling app is the answer and we are proud to see how the company’s computer vision technology within this app can assist consumers with finding and keeping their best photos of their fondest moments.”

The only bad news is that Photo Culling isn’t free, so to use it you’ll have to pay $3 per month or $15 per year. If your photo management skills are a mess and you’re iPhone’s storage space is fast filling up, Canon’s Photo Culling app (available here) offers a free three-day trial to help you decide if it’ll be money well spent.

In the market for a new smartphone with an outstanding camera? Then check out Digital Trends’ top picks.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
New Leica Lux app turns your iPhone into a Leica (sort of)
The Leica LUX app for the iPhone.

If you’ve always coveted a Leica camera, but don’t have the absurd amount of money required to buy one, then perhaps you can make do with camera maker’s new Leica Lux app instead.

Currently only available for the iPhone, the Leica Lux app promises an experience about as close to a Leica as you can get without actually owning one.

Read more
Your Google Photos app may soon get a big overhaul. Here’s what it looks like
The Google Photos app running on a Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Google Photos is set to get a long-overdue overhaul that will bring new and improved sharing and notification features to the app. With its automatic backups, easy sorting and search, and album sharing, Google Photos has always been one of the better photo apps, and now it's set to get a whole slew of AI features.

According to an APK teardown done by Android Authority and the leaker AssembleDebug, Google is now set to double down on improving sharing features. Google Photos will get a new social-focused sharing page in version 6.85.0.637477501 for Android devices.

Read more
The Google app on your Android phone is getting a helpful new feature
Google app on Android beta showing Notifications.

The Google app for Android phones is getting a helpful new feature to make search even better. The latest beta has a dedicated "Notifications" feed in its bottom bar. The feature was first introduced on the mobile version of Google for Android earlier this year. The app feature was first noticed by 9to5Google.

The app now includes a Notifications option at the bottom, next to Discover, Search, and Saved items. The Notifications section displays a continuous list of alerts from Google Search, weather conditions, flight information, sports scores, movies and TV shows, and more. The notifications are grouped under “Today” and “Earlier." This feature should prove handy if you miss a notification from the Google app, as it provides a more focused view than Android's system-level history.

Read more