Clean Up Gives Apple Fans The Magic Eraser They’ve Been Waiting For

You have to be patient to be an Apple faithful.

As a company that iterates more than they innovate, Apple takes the slow road when it comes to new features, letting other companies work out the kinks in the technology before they swoop in with a refined take. That means you’ll sit through years of commercials touting features that you wish you could have natively on your iPhone.

Take Google’s Magic Eraser. It’s a click-to-remove feature that uses machine intelligence to eliminate unwanted features in an image and I was instantly jealous when I saw the first ad. It was available only to Android users for years and then made its way to the Google Photos iOS app. But even then, as a non-native app, it was a little clunky to use.

That’s why I was thrilled to try out the Clean Up feature in iOS 18.1 beta 3.

Apple Intelligence Gives Us A New Solution

For those not familiar, iOS 18.1 is an unusual animal, being the second of two available public beta tests. This one focuses on Apple Intelligence features, things like automatically summarized notifications and intelligently sorted emails.

Beta 3 introduced even more Apple Intelligence features, including Clean Up. A new editing feature in the Photos app that lets you identify and delete unwanted elements in an image with a tap.

How Does It Work?

Open any photo in the Photos app and click the edit icon (the one that looks like three adjustment sliders). You’ll see the new eraser Clean Up icon. The first time you click it, it takes a little less than a minute for iOS 18.1 to download it to your device. After that first time, it’s available instantly.

Once you click Clean Up, iOS 18.1 identifies likely unwanted items and outlines them in the new Apple Intelligence colors. For example, the people at the beach that were in my sunset shot. Then, it’s a simple matter of tapping the items you want to remove. Clean Up gets rid of them and fills in the spot using AI. It’s a similar method to magic eraser tools in other photo editing apps.

If Clean Up doesn’t identify everything, just swipe your finger over the part you want removed. Clean Up finds the outlines of the object and does its thing.

Does it Work Well?

Apple has traditionally been a “it just works” developer and Clean Up is no exception. Especially since the feature outlines items it can easily remove for you, it’s a simple thing to excise them from your image.

You do have to be careful when tapping on small items though. There were a few times when I was cleaning up my sunset pic that I accidentally highlighted a wave next to a swimmer instead of tapping the swimmer. Luckily, Clean Up has the same Undo functionality as other editing tools in Photos.

For visually noisy pictures like my sunset pic (lots of textures, low exposure), Apple Intelligence can easily fill in the photo. You might be able to notice something is off when you zoom in but at a glance, it’s more than wallpaper-worthy.

That doesn’t mean Clean Up is perfect. I ran into issues removing hikers from a picture I took in Colorado Springs. Clean Up excised the hikers only partially and after I highlighted the parts it missed, it still did a clunky job of removing them. Glancing at it, it doesn’t look too bad, but more than a cursory examination and you can see the visual artifacts where they used to be. It looks like a bad clone tool job rather than AI image replacement.

However, this is literally the first release of the feature and it’s still in beta, so I’m not too worried. As Apple gets more data from users it will be able to fine-tune Clean Up even more.

I’m excited to start using this new feature and can’t wait to dig through my Photos archives to find candidates. Clean Up works with every image in your photo library, not just the ones that you took on an iPhone.

iOS 18.1 will be released later this year (sometime after September) but you can try out the beta right now via the Apple Beta program.