Apple today made the third beta of iOS 18.1 available to developers, adding Clean Up, a new Apple Intelligence tool made for the Photos app. Clean Up lets you remove unwanted objects from your photos, though its performance has been mixed so far.
When you tap on any photo and then tap the Edit button, you'll see a new “Clean up” tool with an eraser icon that will automatically highlight anything obvious that can be removed from the image.
Tap on a highlighted object and it will be magically removed. If some objects don't get highlighted automatically, don't worry – you can circle or doodle on any object in your photo to use the cleanup feature.
The cleanup works well for automatically highlighted objects – Apple has already done all the work of finding the depth information and calculating a fill to replace the object in the background – when you select your own objects it can be a bit harder to get a clean look.
Clean up works best when there is a clean background behind the object you want to remove, and the smaller the object, the more effective it is. It won't work very well if you are trying to remove an entire person from the foreground of an image when there is a lot of stuff in the background (such as a group shot), but it is really designed for small, unwanted objects in the background of an image.
You can do multiple iterations of the cleanup to make it look better or remove small areas – just zoom in and then draw in a circle.
Cleanup doesn't work with Live Photos, and using Cleanup will turn off Live Photos. You can turn Live Photos back on, but you'll lose your Cleanup edits. Cleanup doesn't work with videos, but it works with all other types of images, including screenshots, old photos, and photos not taken with your iPhone.
For quick edits on your iPhone, Cleanup is a nice touch — it's not on par with other desktop tools right now, but Apple will no doubt improve it over time — and Cleanup also adds a note to the metadata that an AI edit was made, so others can see that a change was made.
All clean-up edits are reversible, so you can always undo them if you want to go back to your original image.
Other new features in iOS 18.1 Beta 3
In addition to the cleanup, iOS 18.1 beta 3 also adds a few other features: The notification summary feature that previously worked for Mail and Messages now works for all apps, so you can see an overview of both multiple incoming messages and single notifications, giving you more information at a glance.
The Messages app also now allows you to use third-party stickers inline, like emojis. This was previously a beta feature, but it only worked with stickers from Apple apps and stickers created from photos.