How to Clean Up Your iPhone Portfolio and Keep Your Art Organized

Do you want to organize your art portfolio on your iPhone so it’s easy to find the right file? You’re not alone. Today, many artists rely on the iPhone as a primary tool. Whether you work as an illustrator, graphic designer, or UI/UX designer, you will likely use an iPhone to create content, review competitors’ work, collect inspiration, and handle many other tasks.

Let’s be real - when your iPhone also serves as your main device for texts, photos, videos, and everything else, keeping files organized often feels impossible. The good news? You can fix it. In this article, we’ll show you how. Since most portfolios are stored in either the Photos app or the Files app, we’ll concentrate on those and walk you through everything step by step. Each section builds on the last, so by the end, your projects will be sorted and easy to find.

How to Organize Your Portfolio in the Photos App

Since the Photos app often becomes the main hub for your portfolio, whether it’s projects from photo editing apps, elements from logo designs, or website screenshots saved for client presentations, that’s where we start. First, let’s clean up your portfolio. Getting rid of outdated or unnecessary files makes it much easier to concentrate on organizing just the important art items later.

Step 1: Delete Unnecessary Items from Your Portfolio

While the Photos app offers some built-in tools to delete unnecessary photos and videos, we’ve got a better option that gets the job done in just a few taps - Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App. It saves you time organizing your portfolio so you can concentrate more on creating and sharpening your skills.

Why Clever Cleaner over other apps? Because it’s completely free, has no annoying third-party ads, and includes all the features you need to give your portfolio a solid cleanup. It comes with four main tools, but for our purposes, three of them are especially useful. Let’s break them down real quick:

Similars - helps you delete both exact duplicates and similar images (like different versions of the same design). It neatly groups all the identical or similar images, then uses AI to pick the best one, so you can quickly delete the extras and keep what actually matters.
Heavies - targets large files, whether they’re videos or high-res images. It’s beneficial if you’re a motion or graphic designer who saves work in high quality on your iPhone. The app finds these space-hogging files in your gallery, lets you preview them, and delete the ones you don’t need.
Screenshots - with one tap, you can delete all your screenshots or just select the ones you no longer need. Let’s be honest, we all take tons of screenshots to save ideas or design inspiration, but most of them end up forgotten. This tool helps clear them out fast.

All the tools follow a pretty similar process, but to give you a general idea of how they work, let’s walk through the steps using the Heavies feature as an example:

Download Clever Cleaner from the App Store on your iPhone.
Open the app and give it permission to access your Photos library.
At the bottom of the screen, tap Heavies (it’s the first icon on the right) to open the tool for large files.
The app will show you all photos and videos over 25 MB. Tap Sort by at the top and choose to sort by size or date, whatever works best for you.
Scroll through the results and tap on a file you’re ready to delete. The interface will switch to a feed layout. Tap the checkbox to select that file, and swipe left or right to choose more. You can also tap Select All at the top to grab everything at once. When you’re ready, hit Move to Trash to delete the selected files.

A message will pop up at the bottom confirming the items were moved to the app’s trash. If you want to double-check what was deleted, tap the message to review. If you’re sure everything’s good, tap Empty the Trash.

Confirm the deletion. The app will then move the selected photos and videos to the Recently Deleted album in your Photos app. To free up space immediately, go there and permanently delete them.

We recommend using all the tools in the app to clear out as many unnecessary files from your Photos app as possible. Once that’s done, you’ll be ready to organize your portfolio so everything’s easy to find and manage.

Step 2: Organize Portfolio Projects into Albums and Folders

The Photos app has a few built-in features that can help you organize your images and videos, like adding locations or tags. But when it comes to managing a portfolio, we think the most practical way is to create a structure using albums and folders.

The setup is pretty flexible, so you can build it to match how you like to organize your work. For example, you could create an album for each project and add all related images - mockups, landing page screenshots, mobile views, or site photos, then group those albums into a folder labeled with the month and year, like “April 2025.” That’s just one idea, though, you can tailor it to fit your workflow and the type of projects you do. Here’s how to set it up:

Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
Navigate to the ‘Albums’ tab and tap the Create button in the upper right corner.
Select ‘New Album’ from the menu that appears.
Enter a name for your album, go through your photos, and select the images or videos you want to include in this album. Tap ‘Add’ once you have selected all the desired items, and then tap 'Create' to complete the process.

Once you’ve sorted everything into albums, you can group those albums into a folder. The process is almost the same - just make sure you select New Folder instead of New Album when you hit “Create.”

And that’s all it takes to clean up and organize your portfolio in the Photos app. Not too difficult, right? Now, let’s discuss what to do if your portfolio saves in the Files app instead.

How to Organize Your Portfolio in the Files App

While a lot of your portfolio might end up in the Photos app, storing it in the Files app can be more convenient for some people. It keeps your work separate from everyday photos taken with your iPhone camera. So, we’re including this section to give you more flexibility. The basic idea is still the same - clear out anything you don’t need first, then organize the important files into folders.

Step 1: Manually Delete Unnecessary Projects in the Files App

Unfortunately, unlike the Photos app, the Files app doesn’t have helpful tools like Clever Cleaner to automatically remove unnecessary files - due to Apple’s restrictions. So, you’ll have to search and delete files manually. It’s not difficult, just a bit more time-consuming.

Open the Files app on your iPhone.
Navigate to the location where you store your portfolio. This might be “On My iPhone” or “iCloud Drive,” depending on your primary storage setting.

Browse through your files and folders to identify any items you no longer need.
To delete a file, tap and hold on the file until a menu appears.
Select ‘Delete’ from the menu and confirm the deletion if prompted.

Step 2: Organize Necessary Items into Folders

Now that you’ve kept only the necessities in your art portfolio, it’s a good idea to move them into a separate folder. This keeps them from getting mixed up with everything else, like graphics editors, presentations, or project notes. Unlike the Photos app, the Files app only lets you create folders, but you can still stay organized by making folders within folders to build your own structure.

Open the Files app on your iPhone.
Tap the ‘Browse’ tab at the bottom of the screen if you are not already in the browsing view.
Navigate to the location where you want to create a new folder.
Click on the three dots icon to reveal the toolbar at the top of the screen, and tap the folder icon labeled ‘New Folder.’
Enter a name for your new folder and tap ‘Done.’

To add items to your new folder, navigate to the files you want to move.
Click on the three dots icon again, tap Select, and tap on files to add them to the selection.
Tap on the folder icon at the bottom of the screen.
Navigate to your newly created folder and tap ‘Move’ to transfer the files into the folder.

One thing to keep in mind - you can’t drop a folder into another folder in the Files app the same way you can with albums in Photos. So, if you want to use a similar structure to what we suggested for the Photos app, start by creating a main folder with the year. Then, inside that, create individual folders for each project.

What If the Elements of My Portfolio Are Not in One Place?

Sometimes, you might forget, or just not have the time, to keep track of where you’re saving parts of your portfolio. So, some files end up in the Photos app, while others land in the Files app, which can throw off your organization a bit. But no worries - you can easily move files between the two apps and then use the same organization tips we’ve already covered.

How to transfer files from the Photos app to the Files app:

Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
Select the photos or videos you want to transfer.
Tap the share icon (a square with an arrow pointing out of the top).
Scroll through the apps and actions in the share menu and tap ‘Save to Files.’
Choose the location within the Files app where you want to save the items and tap ‘Save.’

How to transfer files from the Files app to the Photos app:

Open the Files app on your iPhone.
Find the file you wish to transfer to the Photos app.
Tap and hold the file until a menu appears.
Tap ‘Share’ from the menu.
In the share menu, tap ‘Save Image’ or ‘Save Video’ to add the file to your Photos library.

Consolidating scattered portfolio elements into one organized location simplifies access, improves presentation, and ensures your artistic work is always ready to showcase.

Conclusion

Now you’ve got the tools to clean up and organize your art portfolio, whether you keep it in the Photos app or the Files app.

That said, we think it’s even more convenient to build an online portfolio on platforms like Behance, LinkedIn, or even Instagram. Not only does this free up space on your iPhone, but it also helps you build your personal brand. It’s a smart move if you want to grow your presence, connect with more people in your field, and land more clients or collaborations. Definitely something worth thinking about.