Clean Up is a Photos app tool in iOS 18 that lets you remove unwanted objects from photos. However, it sometimes has the strange behavior of blurring faces instead of deleting them. You can take advantage of this to hide the identities of people in photos.
Why does Clean Up blur people's faces instead of erasing them?
Clean Up is intended to remove an object when you swipe over or select it, and it does this perfectly in most cases. However, for certain photos, this tool applies a safe filter to the selected face or object instead of removing it. This safety filter is essentially a pixel mosaic effect that is meant to help hide people's identities.
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. After testing this tool on photos, this claim can be confirmed to be accurate.
However, there are cases where Clean Up pixelates faces instead of removing them, even in nice group photos, making you inclined to believe that it might actually be a bug.
How to pixelate people's faces on iPhone using Clean Up
Using Clean Up to pixelate someone's face in a photo is quite easy:
- Go to the Photos app and open the photo you want to edit.
- Press the button Edit (three horizontal sliders) at the bottom and tap Clean Up.
- Select a face by doodling on it or drawing a circle around it and Clean Up will add a safe filter.
- Press 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.
- Open the photo in edit mode and tap Clean Up.
- Draw a square around the face and Clean Up will erase it.
- If that doesn't work – and an alternative safety filter applies – tap Reset and try again.
- If this doesn't work, draw a square over the safety filter and Clean Up will completely erase the face.
- Press Done to save changes.

Warning: Beware that the result will look strange if you keep the person's torso intact and only delete the face.
Clean Up's departure from expected behavior makes it a handy tool for concealing the identities of people in photos. If this is something you usually have to do before posting a photo online, you can now easily do it right in the Photos app and thus eliminate your reliance on risky third-party tools. about security and privacy.