One of the most widely used messaging apps, WhatsApp is also known as being that app that most people in your life use to forward quotes on pictures or memes.
Naturally, because most of the people you have in your WhatsApp contact list, it’s very hard to block their incoming messages and all of the pictures they send can really take a lot of space on your smartphone.
This “huge amount of space taken up by pictures” problem can be solved very easily by opening the Photo Gallery option on your phone (assuming they went there) or if you don’t know where to find the pictures, use a File Manager app to locate WhatsApp’s media folder and delete the entire folder. It’s that easy!
However, WhatsApp doesn’t know how to choose between useless pictures from forwards and the really important ones for you so you might lose the latter ones if you delete everything.
That problem has now been solved by a company founded by ex-employee from Adobe, Stir, which made an app designed to sort through the WhatsApp pictures for the important photos, leaving aside the spam ones.
The app was named Magic Cleaner and this is what it does: it scans the WhatsApp Media Folder and it automatically finds the spam images like screenshots, memes, cartoons and other pictures with text on them. Afterwards, it offers you the option of deleting them all at once.
It does this by using an image recognition engine that analyzes an image in order to determine if it’s spam or not – they take a part of the image and run it through their image database. However, it can only be used if you are connected to the internet because it uses Stir servers to compare the images.
One user has used the Magic Cleaner app on a WhatsApp account that had more than 4000 pictures and it worked wonderfully. And it’s for free! There is a catch though: you can only delete a limited number of photos each day. If you want to delete more, you have to either wait until the next day or invite a friend to use the app.
A Magic Cleaner app for Apple is in the works and a downside to the app is that although it erases the images from the memory, it still leaved the thumbnails for them and those, well, you’ll have to delete manually.
