Turn off “Safety Filter” during “Clean Up” in Photos

Alright, I have a workaround!

It trades efficiency for effectiveness, but it's being consistent for my edits so far and gets the job done like the suddenly defunct retouch tool. (Apple, put it back!)

Select photo

Enter 'Edit' mode

Choose the 'Crop' tab

Zoom in to the area you want to touch up*

Choose the 'Clean Up' tab

Remove what you need to with the tool

Repeat steps 3-6 until all areas are touched up

Choose the 'Crop' tab

Zoom out to the full image

Why this works:

Although this isn't explicitly an Apple Intelligence tool it is absolutely utilizing AI to identify the contents of the photo as a whole before determining if your action will result in a retouch, a redact, or a safety filter being applied.

*By removing the surrounding context (i.e. zooming in until the "unsafe" imagery is no longer referenced within the frame), the tool can proceed with the intended retouch action.

[Edited by Moderator]

You now have to zoom in and crop out what the app is seeing. You actually have to complete the crop by pressing “done” and then on that cropped photo do the remove tool and the “safety filter” will not appear.

After removing what you wanted to remove, hit “done” again and then open the photo again-edit-crop, and undo the earlier crop.

fredfon wrote: … You now have to zoom in and crop out what the app is seeing.

Is this about the Mac or the iPhone? Actually, in either case, I find that I can zoom in on a picture in Clean Up mode (no Crop required) and clean up blemishes and dust spots on faces with no problem. If I zoom out and cover much of a face, though, then I it pixelates the face. I've used Clean Up on a Mac, and I've tested it on m iPhone. It all seems pretty reasonable, and so far, it has worked quite well for me without any multistep contortions.

I’ve just gone in and turned off the Apple Intelligence toggle in settings and it appears to have gone back to how it was before. I guess if you like to use the AI you could switch it back on after you edited your photo. Give it a try!

Jmp_0-64 wrote: …Sadly, the "crop/fix/zoom out" fix isn't working for me.

I wonder if this is a matter of "how much zoom?" I took this picture of a random guy in a cafe, and at smaller zooms, I would get the "Identity Protection" pixels. But then I zoomed in so the face took up the entire screen. (I'm not showing his whole face, here, of course.) But with his face filling the screen I used Clean Up to remove the part in his hair.

I don't mess with "Crop" unless I want to crop.

This is the full screen"

It was the guy on the right. You can see that this was quite a zoom!

Richard.Taylor wrote:

Iceberg1962 wrote: … I tried all the tips mentioned above and they don't work.

Hold it; didn't I just post pictures showing editing a face without pixelation? Why would it work for me and not for you? What are you doing differently?

Generative ai algorithms like this can produce unpredictable results and are something of a black box. We don’t always entirely understand what the “logic” is behind the results the algorithm produces (particularly since it’s not actually using logic in a critical thinking sense, as it’s not sentient and does not have intent, obviously).

I am trying to remove some straight horizontal black lines from a watercolor swatch. I had actually already zoomed/cropped the swatch in quite a bit because I needed it filling up the entire square canvas.

I have no idea why it keeps activating the safety filter on this image, especially since it seems completely inconsistent about it: it applied it immediately when I tried removing the right line, but started to let me erase the left line (fading it out a bit). But when I tried to remove the remaining faded left line, it activated the safety filter for that one too!

I finally gave up and started over using the Repair tool in Photomator instead, which worked perfectly (and was so much faster and easier—it removed each line in one go, no need to go back over them). I use this app for the bulk of my photo editing and I highly recommend it! But it does require a subscription though, it’s not free like just using iOS photos. (To be clear, I don’t work for them or anything, I’m just an artist and am picky about having good editing tools, so for me it’s worth the subscription).

I’m assuming if enough people submit reports about this issue, Apple will fix it eventually, as this clearly isn’t intended behavior. I’m wondering if the safety filter algorithm just hasn’t been trained sufficiently yet or is over-tuned and recognizing way too many things as “sensitive” content.

But yeah ideally they should just let us choose when to use it? I really don’t understand at all why they’d automate something like this, especially since it’s not fully automated, it only activates when someone chooses to try to remove something, and if they’re already making a choice and doing something manually, letting them have full control over that choice makes much more sense.

I’ve just managed to do this but I could only do it via making all the background of a pic blurry that I didn’t want then saving it and then using clean up after and it removed them normally. You can’t ‘unblur’ after but I don’t need to for the pic I wanted.

Zoomin WAY in helped a lot in doing edge cleanup. THANKS!👍🏻

You can just take a screenshot of the picture and it would automatically bypass the security filter by itself….. idk why this happens but it works for me…..

It does both- pixelates & removes (cleans up)

it’s all if the commands you give it depending upon the motion of your finger… go beyond the face if you want it removed… stay on the face if you want pixelated

[Edited by Moderator]

austinbarrow wrote: …This doesn’t need a work around.

That's right. And, as all the screenshots I keep loading show, it seems to work fine if you're careful. But, the best thing to do if it doesn't work for your situation is to leave a message here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

Also, to those saying various “fixes” are or aren’t working for them: I suspect nothing will work 100% consistently all of the time because these fixes aren’t some hardcoded method or loophole of bypassing the rules of the algorithm.

All the fixes simply involve changing the image data the algorithm is working with in some way, so it has a chance of “interpreting” it differently and may produce different results. That doesn’t mean it’s going to work with every image, or even every time on the same image!

I literally got multiple different results trying to edit the same image multiple times (reverting back to the original and starting over using the exact same steps). Both because we likely never select the exact same pixels every time when trying to erase, and because I believe there is always a degree of randomness involved with these sorts of algorithms.

(as an amusing aside: I discovered while annotating the examples in my earlier reply above that the handwriting algorithm is also possibly broken atm…it’s always been fairly inconsistent for me anyway, but completely mangling my handwriting is a new one! lol 😅))

The workaround doesn’t work for me. What does is using a third-party app. Works every time. Many apps do.

I’ve contacted Apple and advised them to correct this knucklehead mistake.

I face the same problem that it get pixelated if I don’t go into crop function.

hones I don’t really like this update.. I would want to have the option to off the safety filter ..:/ not a good update apple for making the clean up default to safe filter.

This is honestly the most annoying feature. I just updated to the latest version of iOS and now I cant even cover simple blemishes easily. Hate to do the extra length just to clean up 1-2 spots without being pixelated. They just keep ruining more with each update.