Questions, ideas, or something not working? Email us at lighten [at] zebel.ai — we read everything.
If Lighten ever grouped two photos that clearly don't belong together, please tell us. That is the failure we care about most.
To Recently Deleted in the Photos app, where they stay for 30 days and can be restored at any point. Lighten never bypasses that — every removal goes through Apple's own deletion, including the system confirmation dialog.
Almost always iCloud's "Optimize iPhone Storage". Your full-size originals live in iCloud and your iPhone keeps smaller copies. Deleting a photo frees its full size in iCloud, but only the smaller copy on the device — so the space you get back locally is less than the photo's real size.
Lighten shows you both numbers before you clean anything, and space only actually frees up once Recently Deleted empties.
Those photos are stored in iCloud, not on your iPhone, and Lighten never downloads your photos. The duplicate scan is affected most, because proving two files are identical requires comparing the real files.
Rather than skip them silently, Lighten tells you how many it couldn't examine. Where it can, it will offer a group as a likely match — same file size, same dimensions, same appearance — clearly labelled as not verified.
That group's photos have identical file sizes and dimensions and look identical, but their originals are in iCloud so Lighten could not compare the actual files. It is very probably a duplicate — but we won't claim proof we don't have. Look at the photos before removing them.
No. Lighten has no server, no account system, and no analytics. Every scan, comparison and calculation runs on your device. Its App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected".
Yes. Limited access is fully supported — Lighten works normally with the photos you picked, and won't nag you to grant more.
The swipe deck, library stats and screenshots list are free forever, with no ads and no daily caps. The smart scans — duplicates, similar photos, blurry shots, screenshots and large videos — plus bulk review-and-clean are a one-time purchase. No subscription.
Your iPhone got warm. Lighten backs off at that point rather than making the whole phone slow, and resumes automatically once it cools. Progress is saved, so nothing is lost.
Yes. Scans checkpoint as they go, so pausing, stopping, or even force-quitting costs you seconds of work rather than the whole scan.
Read the full Privacy Policy.