Cleanup

Cleanup brings the three tools for thinning out a library into one place: Duplicates, Bursts, and Trash. Each surfaces a different kind of clutter; all of them keep your originals safe until you confirm a deletion.

Duplicates

Smriti detects two kinds of duplicates during indexing:

Exact duplicates — files with identical SHA-256 hashes. These are byte-for-byte copies, often the result of importing the same card twice or copying photos between folders.
Perceptual near-duplicates — files that look the same to the eye but aren’t byte-identical. Detected via a DCT perceptual hash (pHash) with a tight threshold (~94% bit agreement). This catches re-encoded copies, JPEG-from-RAW exports, watermarked variants, and rescaled exports of the same source.

The Duplicates view groups suspected matches together. For each group:

Smriti suggests a keeper (typically the largest / highest- resolution version with the most-original-looking filename).
The rest are flagged for trash.
Override the suggestion with a click; Apply moves the marked copies to trash.

Why the threshold is tight

Perceptual hashing is fuzzy by design. A loose threshold flags visually similar but compositionally different photos as “duplicates” — same wall, same lighting, but different subjects. Smriti uses a strict threshold so you don’t have to second-guess every group. Photos that look similar but were taken seconds apart belong to the burst detector, not duplicates.

Bursts

Bursts are short rapid-fire sequences — your phone’s burst mode, or a photographer firing off frames at a moving subject. Smriti detects them by:

Time gap — consecutive photos within 10 seconds of each other.
Burst length — 2+ photos.
Similarity — ≥ 65% visual similarity between consecutive shots.

The Bursts view shows each detected burst as a card; opening it reveals the full sequence. Smriti picks a “best” frame as the keeper (sharpest, with eyes-open if faces are present); the rest can be trashed in bulk.

Bursts are detected on demand the first time you visit the view, then cached. New photos trigger a re-scan.

Tuning burst detection

Burst window in Settings (default 10s) widens or tightens the time gap used.
Detection ignores folder boundaries by default — modern phones group photos by month, not by burst session, so requiring same- folder grouping misses real bursts.

Trash

Trashing a photo doesn’t delete it. It moves the row’s is_trashed flag to true; the photo is hidden from Timeline, Search, Memories, and every other view. The file on disk is untouched until you permanently delete it.

The Trash view lists trashed photos. From it you can:

Restore — return a photo to the active library.
Delete permanently — remove the file from disk and the database row. There’s no undo for this.
Empty trash — permanent-delete everything in trash.

Auto-delete

Settings → Trash → Auto-delete after (default 30 days) permanently deletes photos that have been in the trash longer than the configured window. Set to 0 to disable auto-delete (you’ll have to empty trash manually).

Workflow

A typical cleanup pass:

Open Duplicates → review the suggested keeps → trash the redundant copies.
Open Bursts → review each burst → keep the best, trash the rest.
Browse the Timeline for anything obviously bad you missed.
Open Trash → verify the list → empty trash, or wait for auto-delete.

Smriti Documentation