Sort the photos. Skip the paperwork.
Your camera roll is part photos, part receipts, screenshots and forms. The Documents & receipts switch holds the paper back before a sort, so the review is the pictures you meant to keep.
Receipts are sharp. That is the problem.
A quality sort rewards sharpness and contrast. A receipt, a form or a screenshot is often the sharpest, highest-contrast thing in the roll — so it lands near the top of a pile you opened to find a photo.
The documents switch removes that noise before the ranking starts. It looks at the image on the phone, decides whether it is paper or a screen, and holds those aside. The photos you meant to sort are the ones left in the queue.
- People, places, food, pets
- Trips, days and the photos you meant to take
- Anything you can describe, point at or sort by taste
- Screenshots and screen recordings
- Receipts, bills, forms and photos of paper
- Flat, text-heavy images that are not the point of the roll
Filters → Exclude. On by default.
Open Filters before a sort and the switch is already there, under Exclude. It is on by default, so a new user does not have to discover it to get a clean first sort.
Turn it off when the paper is the point — a receipts album, a folder of forms, a screenshot cleanup. The switch is per sort; it does not change your library.
Nothing leaves the queue and nothing is deleted.
Documents are held aside for that sort, not removed from the phone. Nothing is applied to your library until you act, and deletions always go through the system Photos confirmation dialog.
If excluding documents would leave the batch empty — say you are sorting a Receipts album — they are handed back automatically. The sort never produces zero photos.
The fine print
The document check runs on the iPhone's Neural Engine as part of the sort. It reads an embedding the sort already holds, so it adds no separate image load. No photo, embedding or classification leaves the phone.
It is a classifier, not a promise of perfection. A photo of a receipt on a wooden table can look like a photo of a wooden table. The switch is a filter, and it is one tap to turn off for a batch where the paper is the point. Every filter and control →
- It is not a document scanner. It does not read, transcribe or file receipts.
- It does not delete anything. It holds documents aside for the current sort.
- It does not upload anything for a second opinion. The check is on-device.