Apple released the third beta of iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence on Wednesday, and this beta adds a cleanup feature to the Photos app. For those who don't know, cleanup is a feature that allows you to remove objects and people from your photos using AI. To avoid controversy, the system will label photos that have been edited with cleanup, but most users probably won't even know about it.
Apple will notify you when a cleanup changes your photos, but…
Unlike other AI tools for image editing, Apple's Clean Up can only remove people and objects from photos. It can't add new elements or change people's appearances, etc. Still, simply removing a person from a photo can change the meaning of the photo, which has sparked a lot of controversy recently regarding AI-generated images.
As promised by Apple's VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, iOS 18 will label images that have been generated or edited by Apple Intelligence. This also applies to the Clean Up feature. Users running the latest beta of iOS 18.1 will notice the new labels in the additional information displayed in the Photos app.
When you look at a photo that's been edited with Clean Up, the app will say “Touched up with Clean Up,” and while this is certainly a way to let users know about an image that's been touched up, it's all too easy to miss the label.
First, only Apple devices running iOS 18.1 beta 3 or macOS 15.1 beta 3 will currently show the Clean Up label in the Photos app. While a photo's EXIF data does indeed contain the label “Apple Photos Clean Up,” you'll need to use a computer or special software to find this information.
Sending photos via AirDrop or iMessage will preserve the cleaned up label in the EXIF data, but sending via apps like WhatsApp or Telegram will not preserve this label.
Of course, this is the first beta version of Clean Up, and there's still time before Apple can make this information more visible to users, and more importantly, the company should provide a way for third-party apps to detect and leave these tags on photos.
Clean Up is part of the Apple Intelligence feature coming in iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 later this year. Note that to use Apple Intelligence, you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later, or an iPad and Mac with an M1 chip or later.
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