How To Use The AI Clean Up Tool In iOS 27 To Remove Unwanted Objects In iPhone Photos

Apple is adding a bunch of new AI features in iOS 27, with one of the most essential apps, Photos, getting some cool AI upgrades too. There’s one feature in particular that’s getting much better with iOS 27: Clean Up. This tool has been around since iOS 18 redesigned the Photos app, though it’s always lagged far behind its competitors. But thanks to Apple’s new AI models, Clean Up is now much better at removing objects from your photos.

Before you can use the upgraded Clean Up, your iPhone needs iOS 27. If you’ve already installed the update, the next step is to enable Apple Intelligence if it’s not already. That means you need an iPhone 15 Pro or later. If you have an older iPhone, you won’t be able to take advantage of this feature. 

If you’ve used Clean Up before, you’ll know where to find it in iOS 27. The difference is that it now has some extra controls. To start, choose a photo you want to adjust in the Photos app and tap the Edit button at the bottom. Select Tools and choose Clean Up. You’ll see an Auto button at the top, which lets you change the processing type. Leave this set to Auto to have your phone choose between the other two modes depending on how complex the image is. 

Fast retouches your photos with a smaller AI model. It gets the job done much faster, but it’s not ideal for more complex retouching. Say you have a photo of a landscape and you want to remove a trash can in the background. Or maybe you need to hide the wiring on the street lights. These are the kinds of edits that the Quick model is most likely to handle well.

But where Apple’s Clean Up feature has always struggled is with more complex edits. When there are a bunch of people behind you ruining your selfie, that’s where the High Quality option comes in. More advanced AI models can better understand the context of an image. But this improved processing comes at the cost of taking longer and using more battery.

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

Clean Up often tries to recognize unknown objects that you’ll want to remove from your photo. This doesn’t always work as it should, so it’s more accurate to circle what you want to remove.

For other cases where a photo didn’t come out like you intended, iOS 27 introduces two extra photo-editing features: Extend and Reframe. Extend uses AI to expand the area around your photo. Imagine you took a selfie, but it’s too close to your face. Extend can fix this by understanding the context to generate more of the image around it, filling in what’s already in the photo. Just pinch to zoom out as much as you want. It may take a while before you see the results, but that’s normal.

Reframe is different: it changes the perspective and angle from which you originally took the photo. For example, maybe you weren’t looking at the camera when the picture was taken. Reframe lets you change that without retaking the photo. The results are hit or miss, though. Some photos appear natural. Others end up looking like AI slop, with the model hallucinating objects or even people who weren’t originally there. It’s worth a try if you really don’t like the original photo, but don’t get your hopes up. Improving your smartphone photography in the first place should have better results.