Photos you marked as favorites, and shots taken in Portrait mode, are now left out of every cleanup category. Until now they were only skipped when looking for blurry photos — a favorite could still turn up among duplicates or similar shots, even though AskClean was set to leave favorites alone.
The video quality you pick in Settings now also shapes what a scan finds. The scan used to estimate savings at 720p no matter what you had chosen, so picking a lower quality showed you smaller savings than you would actually get — and some videos were left out of the list entirely for "not saving enough".
Improved
Compressing a long video no longer looks stuck. There is now a second progress bar for the video being worked on, with its own percentage — a one-hour video takes minutes to convert, and the overall bar barely moves during that time.
Settings gains two switches: skip favorites, and skip Portrait mode photos. Both are on by default. Turn one off if you do want to clean up duplicates among your favorites.
After recovering a damaged video, AskClean now reports how many frames it actually kept, out of the total. It used to report only the frames it discarded, which read as "everything else was kept" — frames that depend on a lost keyframe cannot be recovered either, so the real figure is lower.
3.6
AskClean can now update itself, and everything on screen follows the language you picked inside the app.
Automatic updates — from this version on, AskClean checks for a new release once a day and shows you what changed. Nothing is downloaded or installed until you confirm, so a scan in progress is never interrupted. Check manually, or turn the daily check off, in Settings.
AskClean now tells you when the AI is still analyzing a folder. That wait can take half a minute, and until now the rows showed only local details in the meantime — it looked like the AI had never run.
Improved
Switching the language inside AskClean now re-translates a finished scan on the spot — item names, details, dates, month groups and the current step all follow, and your selections and answers are kept.
Dates, numbers and sizes now follow the language you picked inside AskClean rather than the macOS system language.
Long translations on the home screen are no longer cut off.
Fixed
The size filter for large files compared in binary units but was labelled in decimal ones, so a 50 MiB threshold appeared as 52 MB. The menu now reads MiB. File sizes elsewhere remain decimal, matching Finder.
Large downloads were described as being over 500 MB, while the scan has always used a 100 MiB threshold. The wording is corrected; the scan itself is unchanged.
The uninstall summary now picks the right plural form for the number of items that could not be removed — languages with more than one plural rule were getting the wrong one.
Apps with no version string no longer show an empty version tag in the uninstall list.
The uninstall finish screen could report a reclaimed total that did not match what was actually removed.
3.5
The largest release so far: clean up any folder, reclaim space from messaging apps, and uninstall apps far more thoroughly.
Folder Cleanup — point AskClean at any folder and it finds duplicate photos, near-identical shots and oversized videos, then cleans them in place.
Messaging app cleanup — 14 chat apps, split into cache, media and files so you decide what actually goes.
Smarter uninstall — AskClean now spots a vendor’s own uninstaller, finds related components, and leaves shared data alone when another installed app still needs it.
Empty the Trash for good — clear what is already sitting in the Trash straight from the finish screen.
Two new scan groups: device backups (iPhone and iPad) and mail attachments.
Full Disk Access guidance — when macOS blocks a folder, AskClean links straight to the right System Settings pane.
Improved
Redesigned home screen — disk cleanup and photo & video cleanup are now equal entry points.
Faster full scan: 58–66 seconds down to 34 seconds on our test Mac.
Photo compression and video transcoding now run in parallel — 41% less time in our tests.
Similar-photo detection runs 3.4× faster.
Sizes are now shown in decimal units, matching what Finder reports.
Fixed
hev1-tagged HEVC videos are now repackaged losslessly instead of failing with a decoder error.
Read-only volumes are detected when you pick the folder, instead of failing item by item.
Apps that are still installed are no longer listed as uninstall leftovers.
Reclaimable size for photos now estimates what compression actually saves, instead of counting the whole file.
3.3
Photo and video cleanup arrives — AskClean is no longer only a disk cleaner.
