Why I built Aglio instead of paying cloud rent forever

The core frustration was not that cloud storage exists. It was that it becomes the default answer to a problem that is partly avoidable. Most people do not need every screenshot, every almost-identical picture, and every oversized old video available in their main gallery forever. But reviewing that mess manually is slow, and slow workflows simply do not happen.

So I built Aglio around a simple bar: the app should matter. It should shrink a gallery enough that the cleanup feels worth doing. And it should do that without turning personal media into a cloud AI problem.

The problem was not just compression

If compression were the only problem, a command-line tool would be enough. Some commenters on the original post suggested exactly that. But productizing this on iPhone is mostly about everything around compression: free-space management, resumability, user-controlled review, safe selection, and not leaving the phone in a broken or half-finished state.

What Aglio was designed to do

Make review and deletion fast

Deletion is where most cleanup efforts die. You open Photos, feel overwhelmed, postpone it, and eventually buy more storage. Aglio breaks work into smaller chunks so you can review duplicates, screenshots, and clutter without needing a giant cleanup session.

Reduce cloud costs by reducing junk

The goal is not to convince everyone to stop paying for iCloud or Google Photos. The goal is to make sure you are not paying those subscriptions just to retain obvious waste.

Shrink the gallery enough that the app earns its place

That is why the feature set is focused on the categories that actually move the needle: videos, similar photos, format conversion, and obvious junk classification.

The feature decisions came from that frugal lens

• Bulk video compression: select the videos you want, preview a profile, and compress in one go. Old videos are often the biggest win.
• Similar picture grouping: metadata alone is not enough, so grouping is based on actual image similarity and then a best image is auto-marked to speed review.
• Photo compression: converting PNG and JPEG-heavy sections of a library to more efficient formats can free a surprising amount of space.
• Auto junk classification: screenshots and random object photos usually need a faster, lower-thought review path.
• Face protection: if you mark loved ones, those photos stay out of risky cleanup flows.

What I cared about technically

The app was built around reliability constraints that are easy to underestimate from the outside. If the phone has too little free space, compression cannot just blindly continue. If the app gets backgrounded, it should resume cleanly instead of restarting work. If cleanup depends on user deletion via Photos and Recently Deleted, the workflow needs to respect how iOS actually behaves instead of pretending the app controls everything.

That is why the implementation focus went into checkpointing, state recovery, active space management, and keeping the app stable during large batch operations. The goal was never to wrap a raw media tool with a pretty button. The goal was to make the whole process trustworthy enough to use on a real personal library.

Why the pricing is lifetime

I priced Aglio at a one-time lifetime unlock because the whole point is to feel cheaper and cleaner than endless utility subscriptions. If someone can try the free tier, decide it helps, and then pay once, that feels more aligned with the product than trapping them in another recurring bill.

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