How to Use AI Clean Up Tool in iOS 27 to Remove Unwanted Objects in iPhone Photos

Apple is adding a number of new AI features in iOS 27, with one of the most essential apps, Photos, also getting some exciting AI upgrades. There is one feature in particular that gets a lot better with iOS 27: Clean Up. This tool has been around since iOS 18 redesigned the Photos app, although it is still far behind its competitors. But thanks to Apple’s new AI models, Clean Up is now much more effective at removing objects from your photos.

Before you can use the upgraded cleaning, your iPhone needs iOS 27. If you have already installed the update, the next step is to enable Apple Intelligence if you haven’t already. This means you need an iPhone 15 Pro or later. If you have an older iPhone, you will not 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 additional controls. To get started, choose a photo you want to adjust in the Photos app and tap the icon To modify button at the bottom. Select Tools and choose To clean. You will see a Auto at the top, which allows you to change the type of processing. Leave this setting at Auto for your phone to choose between the other two modes depending on the complexity of the image.

Fast edits your photos with a smaller AI model. The job gets done much faster, but it’s not ideal for more complex touch-ups. Let’s 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 from street lights. These are the kinds of changes that the Fast the model is most likely to perform well.

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

Filipe Espósito for Woozad

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

For other cases where a photo didn’t turn out as expected, iOS 27 introduces two additional photo editing features: Extend And Crop. 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 solve this problem by understanding the context to generate more of the image around it, filling in what’s already in the photo. Simply pinch to zoom out as much as you want. It may take a while to see results, but this is normal.

Crop 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 photo was taken. Reframe lets you change this without reshooting the photo. The results are, however, random. Some photos look natural. Others end up looking like AI dirt, hallucinating the model of objects or even people that weren’t there originally. 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 first should yield better results.