Remove People from Photos

Why a box works better than a tap for people

People are made of parts with very different colors: hair, a face, a bright jacket, dark trousers. When you tap once, the AI object selector has to guess which of those you mean, and it often picks just the jacket or just the face. A box removes the doubt: it says “the whole thing inside here”, and the selector returns the complete outline of the person. You can still tap inside the box afterward to add a missed hand, or turn on Subtract and tap to exclude someone standing behind them.

Scenes where it works best

People against sky, sea, sand, grass, snow, plain walls or pavement are the easy cases, because the AI only needs to continue a simple texture. Busy streets and crowds are harder: if a person stands in front of a shop window or another person, the space behind them has to be invented from very little information, and the fill can look soft.

Distant figures are much easier than nearby ones. A small tourist in the background usually vanishes without a trace, while someone filling a third of the frame leaves a large area to reconstruct. For a person right in the foreground, try removing them in two or three smaller pieces, starting from the edges.

Common snags and fixes

• A dark smudge remains on the ground: that is the shadow. Brush over it and remove again.
• A bag or a dog leash stays behind: tap it while the person is still selected to add it, or remove it as a second step.
• The fill repeats something odd: press Undo and draw a slightly larger box. A little extra margin gives the AI more context to copy from.
• Two people overlap: remove the one in front first, then the one behind.

Respectful editing

Removing passers-by is a good way to protect the privacy of strangers who never asked to appear in your photos; for faces you want to keep but hide, Blur Faces is the gentler option. Please don’t use object removal to mislead, for example by altering news, evidence or documents. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded, so the original photo and the edited one stay with you.

What gets downloaded

The first time you use the tool, your browser asks to download the AI engine, the object selector and the object remover, about 61 MB together, from our own domain. They are stored in your browser for next time. The editing works on a copy up to 2048 pixels wide, and saving applies each removal to your original full-size photo, so the rest of the image is untouched.