Clean Up is an Apple Intelligence feature that’s baked into the Photos app which can help remove distractions from your pictures. So how do you use it, and how well does it work? Let’s find out.

Introducing Clean Up for Apple Photos

Since Apple’s competition has had an AI-based object eraser for a while, Apple’s Clean Up feature is a bit late to the party. Available as an Apple Intelligence feature, Clean Up utilizes on-device machine learning abilities to identify and remove distractions like people, animals, objects, and other elements from a picture.

Clean Up in Photos is available in iOS 18.1 or later on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 family of devices. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to edit a picture captured using an Apple Intelligence-supported iPhone or an older iPhone, the feature works on every photo in your gallery (wait until you see the samples attached below).

How to Use The Clean Up Feature on Your iPhone

Using the Clean Up object removal tool is pretty straightforward (and intuitive). All you have to do is open the picture from which you wish to remove distractions, tap on the three horizontal lines “Edit” button at the bottom, and select Clean Up from the available options.

If Clean Up isn’t available on your device, check whether you’re using a compatible iPhone. Further, see if Apple Intelligence is enabled on your device in Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri. If you’ve just turned the personal intelligence system on, give it some time to download all the required features.

When you first use Clean Up, it might download some feature-related files. In my experience with the feature, I had to download the files a couple of times, which was a bit weird. However, it also reminded me that the feature is in beta.

How Well Does Apple Intelligence Clean Up Work?

While using the feature on different pictures, I noticed that my iPhone 16 took a few seconds to prepare the feature for pictures. When the Clean Up tool recognizes the objects or items in the picture, it makes them glow in the same rainbow hue that shows up whenever an Apple Intelligence feature is invoked on an iPhone. Then, all I’ve got to do is tap on the highlighted objects to make them vanish into thin air.

In my time with the Clean Up feature, it worked well eight out of 10 times. Removing people or other evident distractions is a piece of cake for the feature. However, it struggles in pictures with tricky lighting conditions, mainly where the boundary between the objects and the background isn’t evident.

Even so, it seems as effective as other mobile object eraser solutions, like Magic Eraser (which is also available on iOS).

Take the picture above, for example. The moment I tapped on the “Clean Up” button at the bottom, it highlighted the people in the background; I simply tapped on the highlighted portions to make the people disappear, resulting in a clean and clear picture.

In the picture above, Apple Intelligence does an excellent job of picking up the person standing on the left. However, since the picture had three human subjects, Clean Up didn’t suggest any removals immediately.

Instead, I had to scrub my finger all over the person to select it, and within a few seconds, the tool removed it. I was surprised to see how well the tool filled up the empty background (just like the feature works on Samsung’s Galaxy devices), extending the photo frame and the couch at the bottom. It also adds the corner of the walls, which is quite impressive.

To give a good idea of what the feature can do, I’ve tried to remove over a dozen hanging lanterns in the picture above. Notice how the feature misses the wall corners at the top left. Further, it smooths over the ceiling way too much.

One thing is for sure: the Clean Up tool works exceptionally well with human subjects, but only when there’s a clear difference between them and the background. Notice how, in the picture above, the feature highlights and removes the human subjects without leaving a trace (and successfully fills in the background details).

However, in the above photo, where the human subjects are sitting in front of the bright glass exterior of the showroom, the feature struggles to remove them properly. In fact, it creates a mess by extending the green color (from the cap of the bottles).

When I first showed the feature to a friend, she immediately sent me the picture above, asking me to remove the four ice cream cups she was holding (the image was captured on an iPhone 13). While the cups on the top of the counter disappear well, it leaves questionable streaks behind the cups in her right hand.

As I mentioned earlier, the feature works well with small objects, especially humans, as it is easier for the AI to detect them. However, it struggles a bit with tricky pictures. I hope that the feature gets better with time, especially with iOS 18.2, which introduces new Apple Intelligence features.