With Apple Intelligence, Apple has added a powerful feature to the Photos app: Clean Up. With this smart tool you can easily remove unwanted objects, distracting elements and even people from your photos, without the need for external apps. Whether it’s a passerby in the background or a distracting detail, Clean Up helps you capture images exactly as you intended them.
The feature uses advanced on-device AI to analyze selected parts of a photo and fill them naturally. This preserves structures, colors and lighting, which ensures a realistic end result. This makes Spacious a valuable addition for anyone who wants to perfect their photos quickly and easily, directly from the standard Photos app on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Clean up: Remove elements from photo
The ‘Clean up’ function allows you to remove distracting objects and people from the background of a photo. This will undoubtedly become the most used AI feature in the Photos app and works very well.
- Open a photo in the Photos app
- Tap the edit icon (horizontal stripes with dots) or click Edit
- Go to the ‘Clean up’ or ‘Retouch’ option
After you tap Clean Up, some items may be automatically highlighted so you can quickly tap them to delete them. These parts get a colorful glow.
To delete something, you can tap/click it, swipe it, or circle it. If necessary, zoom in to delete a part in detail. Apple Intelligence is very accurate and will try to remove the parts as best as possible.
Select image quality
Available from software update 27
With update 27, Ruim uses new AI models, allowing the function to handle complex scenes and larger objects much better. In addition, you can now choose from three variants to have the elements removed.
- Quick is for quick, easy retouches and responds quickly to adjustments.
- High quality takes more time, but reconstructs details in busy backgrounds much more realistically, for example in city photos or wooded landscapes.
- Automatic lets Photos choose the right mode based on the scene you select, useful for users who don’t want to think about the right quality mode.
On a Mac, you can select the Retouch option directly from the Image Quality sidebar once you’ve chosen the Retouch option. On an iPhone or iPad, you can adjust this after activating the Clean Up tool and tapping the drop-down menu.
In practice, this means that things like unwanted passers-by, trash cans, or distracting signs disappear more credibly from photos, both on iPhone and iPad and in Photos on Mac.
Safety filter with pixel effect
Not all requests to delete objects or people are fulfilled by Apple Intelligence. When the feature detects a person who may not want his or her image altered, or when removing an element compromises the photo’s integrity too much, Apple triggers a safety filter. Instead of actually deleting the object, the tool then applies a pixel effect to the selected area. This ensures that the element becomes visible but unrecognizable, thus safeguarding privacy and ethical considerations.
Cannot be disabled
This security mechanism is a conscious choice by Apple to prevent abuse and protect the privacy of people. The pixel effect mainly appears when attempting to remove faces or sexually explicit photos, or when the AI ​​has doubts about the consent given. Therefore it is not possible to disable the safety filter.
For users, this means that Cleanup doesn’t always guarantee ‘perfect’ removal, but it does provide a responsible solution that strikes a good balance between photo editing and privacy.