You Can Pixelate People’s Faces in Photos Using iPhone’s Clean Up Tool

Clean Up is a Photos app tool in iOS 18 that lets you remove unwanted objects from photos. However, it sometimes shows strange behavior and pixelates faces instead of erasing them. You can use this to hide the identity of people in photos.

Why Clean People’s Pixelated Faces Instead of Deleting them?

Clean Up is meant to remove an object when you delete or select it, and it does this perfectly in most scenarios. However, with some photos, the tool will apply a safety filter on the selected face or object instead of removing it. This security filter is essentially a pixelated mosaic effect meant to help obscure people’s identities.

We are not 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 pictures myself and found the claim to be accurate.

However, there have been instances where Clean Up pixelates instead of erasing, even in decent group photos, leading me to believe that it might actually be a bug.

How to pixelate people’s faces on your iPhone Using Clean Up

Using Clean Up to pixelate someone’s face in a photo it’s quite easy:

1. Go to the Photos app and open the photo you want to edit.

2. Hit the Edit button (three horizontal sliders) at the bottom and touch Clean up.

3. Select the scribbling face above or draw a circle around it, and Clean Up will add the security filter.

4. Hit Done to save the photo.

On the other hand, if you really want to remove someone’s face from a photo, the process is a little different.

1. Open the photo in editing mode and tap Clean up.

2. Draw a square around the face, and Clean Up should remove it.

3. If not, and apply a security filter instead, tap Reset and try again.

4. If that still doesn’t work, draw a square on the security filter, and Clean Up should completely remove the face.

5. Hit Done to save the changes.

Clean Up’s deviation from expected behavior makes it a useful tool for obscuring the identities of people in photos. If this is something you often need to do before putting photos online, you can now do it easily, directly in the Photos app, and in turn, eliminate the reliance on Third-party tools that pose security and privacy risks.