Will an AI photo cleaner delete pictures from iCloud too?
Your phone is full and you want room to record something today. That is a lousy moment to decide which family pictures you can live without. Before letting an AI photo cleaner remove anything, check which storage is full: Settings → General → iPhone Storage, or Settings → your name → iCloud. They are different problems. Apple's existing guide says that with iCloud Photos, deleting a photo on one device also deletes it on the other devices signed in to the same Apple Account. If a cleaner deletes from that synced library, ‘I still have it in iCloud’ is not a safe assumption. This is about Apple's sync behavior, not a test of any particular cleanup app. If you want to keep the pictures and reduce the space they take on the phone, look at Optimize iPhone Storage instead. Apple says it keeps full-resolution originals in iCloud and smaller copies on the device when needed. You need enough iCloud space; it does not solve a full iCloud account. Make a separate copy of pictures you cannot replace before deleting. Apple normally allows recovery from Recently Deleted for 30 days, but warns that photos deleted while you exceed your iCloud storage limit are removed immediately and cannot be recovered there. I would want a cleanup assistant to ask ‘Do you want less stored on this phone, or fewer pictures in your library?’ before proposing a deletion list. Which problem are you actually trying to solve?
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I would ignore the cleaner's count of photos flagged and check the available space in iPhone Storage before and after any change. A long deletion list is not evidence that you have room for the video you wanted to record. Apple's guide gives you a device-level check; use that rather than the app's estimate of what it could reclaim. Once the storage reading updates, try a short recording at your intended settings. That is a practical check I would make, not a result from testing a cleaner. If the phone has enough room, there is no reason to keep pruning family pictures just to finish the suggested list.
A blurry photo might be the only one where everyone is laughing. I would not let ‘low quality’ double as ‘safe to delete.’ Before reviewing a cleanup list, I would want a way to exclude an album or mark particular pictures as keepers, without having to defend each one to the assistant. Then leave those choices alone on the next scan. That is a boundary I would ask for, not a feature I have tested. Technical quality is useful for sorting; it cannot tell you which afternoon you want to remember.