Please help... when I open a photo, there is a little icon in the bottom right corner (explore). how to I remove this? (I want a clean screen shot.)

That icon represents "Live Text," and it's there because it found text somewhere in the picture. If I copy your picture and click on the live text icon to copy, and paste it somewhere, it says "lack." That's pretty cool!

If you don't want Live Text, go to the Mac "System Settings>General>Language & Region" and turn off Live Text. It will go away. (You can also just go to System Settings and type Live Text in the search box.)

HOWEVER, what Phil0124 said makes sense. Doing a screenshot to get a copy of the picture is doesn't give the best results. There are often other crazy icons at the top of the image, too. So, if you want to send the picture in an email, you can control-click on the picture, chose Share, and select Email. Or Messages, or AirDrop, and so on. If you want to do other things with it, you can select the picture and choose File>Export>Export 1 Photo, and you can choose the size and nature of the image, and put it in the folder of your choice.

You cannot remove UI elements from the screen from a screen shot.

Why do you need a screen shot of a photo? Why not just the photo itself in that case?

Screen shots generally include everything on the screen as you are trying to show something in the context of what is on the screen. Kind of strange to want to hide things for a screen shot?

If you just want a copy of the photo without anything around or over it, then just export a copy from the Photos app's File menu directly.

After I typed "lack" which is just what the computer said, I looked more closely at your name in the post and realized the computer was only 75% correct.

And, by the way, Nice Picture!