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Clean Up is a Photos app tool in iOS 18 that enables you to remove undesired objects from photos. However, it sometimes exhibits an odd behavior and pixelates faces instead of deleting them. You can leverage this to hide people’s identities in photos.
Clean Up is meant to remove an object when you brush over or select it, and it does this perfectly in most scenarios. However, with certain photos, the tool applies a safety filter over the selected face or object instead of deleting it. This safety filter is essentially a pixelated mosaic effect meant to help obscure people’s identities.
We aren’t sure if this behavior is intentional or just a bug. Some forum discussions suggest that Clean Up does this when it identifies something in a photo as inappropriate or sensitive. I tested the tool on such photos myself and found the claim to be accurate.
However, there were instances when Clean Up pixelated faces instead of deleting them, even in decent group pictures, predisposing you to believe that it could actually be a bug.
How to Pixelate People’s Faces on Your iPhone Using Clean Up
Using Clean Up topixelate someone’s face in a photois easy enough:
On the other hand, if you actually want to remove someone’s face from a photo, the process is a little different.
Beware that this will look odd if you keep the person’s body and only remove the face.
Clean Up’s deviation from expected behavior makes it a handy tool for obscuring people’s identities in photos. If this is something you often need to do before putting up pictures online, you can now do it easily, right in the Photos app, and in turn, eliminate reliance onthird-party tools that pose security and privacy risks.
