Google Photos’ magic eraser is a feature that Apple urgently needs to copy

Magic Eraser is aptly named. Included in the paid Google One subscription since February 2023, this feature allows users of the Google Photos app to perform normally complicated edits in just a few seconds. Just circle what you want in the image and Google’s artificial intelligence will eliminate it and replace it with what it imagines to be behind. The most spectacular is that the magic eraser works well, while it is sometimes complicated to perform the same type of action manually in Photoshop.

During my last vacation, I had the opportunity to use the magic eraser of my Google One subscription several times. Although an Apple Photos and iCloud Photo Library user for more than a decade (and iPhoto before that), I found myself going back and forth between Apple’s software and Google’s software a lot just to use the magic eraser, before transferring the modified image to Apple’s software. A frustrating routine, which leads me to believe that Apple needs to make the magic eraser a priority in iOS 17 if it doesn’t want to see some users switch to the competition.

The magic eraser is amazing

Why use Google Photos rather than Apple Photos today? While some may salute Google’s better face recognition, the memories highlighted on a daily basis or the more generous free storage, I for my part have never been interested in the Google application, which I only use when I am on an Android smartphone. It is for this reason that I think the situation is urgent for Apple. For the first time in 15 years of iPhones, a feature made me want to use the competing app.

During my holidays, I used the magic eraser to:

• Create landscape photos without anyone on them (there is always a person lying on a beach, which spoils a panorama).
• Make my selfies with my friends more intimate, without having to retake a photo several times without anyone walking behind.
• Delete trash and objects, such as a trash can, that make a photo less attractive.
• Quickly retouch a face, on which there would be for example a shadow or a reflection. (Be careful, the magic eraser, as its name suggests, eraser. It is not made to remove dark circles or a pimple, since it erases everything radically.)
• Remove a photo error, such as a glare from the sun or a streetlight.

While the Magic Eraser isn’t perfect, since some changes remain visible when looked at closely, it does create remarkable results most of the time, including when I attempted to delete people who were prominent on the picture. The more complicated the background, the more logically difficult it is, but the magic eraser comes out honorably very often.

I understand that some purists see it as a shame for photography, but that’s not how I see the function at all. For my part, it is a tool designed to save important moments, whose ease of use makes editing accessible to a greater number of users. This is exactly what I expect from software like Google Photos, which should not just be content with storing photos in the age of artificial intelligence.

All the people who have seen my photos retouched with the magic eraser reacted in the same way: they are hallucinated by the speed with which the retouching took place. All this reinforces my opinion that the Google function is exceptional and must quickly become the norm, on Android and iOS.

The Apple case: can the magic eraser arrive with iOS 17?

Formerly reserved for Pixel smartphones, Google’s magic eraser is now available on iPhones in Google Photos, but only if the user has a Google One plan (paid storage, for Gmail and other Google applications). This paid character gives Apple some respite, although it seems obvious that the magic eraser will eventually be made available for free. You might as well anticipate it by proposing a competitor quickly.

Does Apple have the capacity to respond to the magic eraser quickly, from iOS 17 in June, for example? It is often said that Tim Cook’s company is outdated in terms of artificial intelligence, but this is not really the case. On the contrary, at the level of image recognition, automatic clipping or the extraction of data from images or videos, Apple has shown over the past two years that it was ahead of Google. Removing a person from a photo shouldn’t be complicated for Apple. However, we know that the Californian brand is not one to go too fast to please its users. She sees in the long term, which could postpone the release of a magic eraser in Apple Photos in time if the project has not been launched several months back.

What about the price? While Apple reserves a few features for its iCloud+ subscribers, all of Apple Photos is available for free. Since iPhones have a chip dedicated to artificial intelligence (the Neural Engine), we imagine that the magic eraser with Apple sauce would work locally. Apple therefore has every reason in the world to offer this service for free, whereas Google currently charges for the use of its servers.

What is the percentage chance of seeing a magic eraser land in iOS 17 this summer? If we look at the last WWDC (Apple’s conference during which its new operating systems are announced), Apple Photos has always been in the spotlight, just like iMessage. A few months after Google’s announcement, and more than a year after the arrival of the magic eraser on Pixels, it would be anything but surprising to see Apple adopt the function. In any case, I will very much hope so, since my last experience abroad does not make me want to come back to Apple Photos at all.

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