Audit thousands of phone screenshots for sensitive data and plan deletions

Dubowsky had 2,311 screenshots on his iPhone dating back to 2019. He selected them all in Photos, copied them into a single folder on his laptop and opened Claude Code in the Claude desktop app on that folder. He told it to look only, with no moving, deleting or uploading, and to list every image showing a barcode or QR code, an identity document, bank details, a home address or someone else's private messages, with the file name and a one-line description. In two follow-up prompts he had it explain what a stranger could do with each flagged image, sort them into delete, store safely or keep, and produce a one-page list with the date of each so he could find them on the phone.

It worked through the folder in batches over one evening and used most of his daily allowance. It flagged 31: nine boarding passes, five tickets for upcoming events, four banking screens, three photos of his passport and licence, six with home addresses and four of other people's chats. It suggested deleting 24, moving the three ID photos somewhere safer and keeping four, including a ticket whose old code was already dead. Deleting them on the phone took him about twenty minutes by hand, then he emptied Recently Deleted and removed the laptop copies.

The agent never touched the phone; it only saw the copies, so the deleting stays manual. Every sensitive image, passport included, passes through the model to be found, which the author admits is an awkward trade. Small or blurry text can be misread, so check anything it calls fine. The post doubles as promotion for the author's paid prompt products.