Last Updated on September 3, 2024 by Dominic
Apple has introduced a new Clean Up feature in the Photos app with the iOS 18.1 beta 3 release for developers as part of its Apple Intelligence suite.
The Clean Up tool, first announced at WWDC 2024 in June, is similar to Google’s popular Magic Eraser feature and is powered by Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
This AI-powered feature helps users easily remove distracting or unwanted objects from their photos without compromising the rest of the image. It is accessible when you edit the pictures and is signified by an eraser-style icon in the bottom toolbar.
Further, the Clean Up tool uses smart detection, depending on multiple machine-learning models, to detect, isolate, and eliminate unwanted objects, including shadows and reflections, from the image with just one tap.
While the AI tool can automatically identify all the potential distractions in the image’s background, users can manually zoom in and use their fingers to remove unwanted objects by tapping, circling, or brushing over them. This feature can also differentiate between people and objects, ensuring that no part of a person is accidentally removed or replaced.
Once an item is removed, the image uses a generative fill-like approach to seamlessly blend the edited region with the rest of the image. Further, the Clean Up function works on all images in the Photos library and is not limited to photos taken on iPhones.
The Clean Up feature is available for developers in the iOS 18.1 beta 3, which can be downloaded from the Apple Developer website. It is also available in the latest iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 betas. However, this Clean Up tool is currently only limited to U.S. users with iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models, M1-powered iPads and Macs, or newer.