I have a bunch of photos from my trip to Cartagena that came out with a watermark from the Xiaomi camera app. I saw there are apps that use AI to remove that, but I don't know which ones are reliable. Has anyone tried Cleanup or something similar on Android? I'm worried the photo will end up pixelated.
I've used apps like this and honestly, some of the results are decent if the watermark isn't too big or intricate. Cleanup works pretty well on Android, but keep in mind it really depends on what you're removing: if it's a small logo in the corner, it'll probably come out clean, but if it takes up half the photo the AI might leave artifacts or weird patches. Other options worth trying are Remove.bg (which is mainly for backgrounds, but has options to clean stuff), Huawei's Inpaint (if you have that phone), or Adobe Firefly if you access it through the web. They all use generative AI, so quality is hit or miss.
What works best is exporting your photos at high resolution before using any app, because that gives the algorithm more info to reconstruct the area. On Android, most of these apps have a free version but with quality limits or a cap on how many edits you can do, so test it out first with a photo that's less important. If the watermark is really annoying, you might end up having to edit it manually with tools like Snapseed (which has a pretty good healing brush) or Photoshop on mobile, though that takes longer.
Whether it comes out pixelated really depends on the size of the watermark and the AI. If you just need to remove something tiny, it'll look fine. If the watermark covers too much area or has complex details behind it, then yeah, the result might look weird, whether it's AI or manual editing.
The most important thing is that before using any app, crop the photo so the watermark takes up as much as possible of the area that the AI processes - that gives it better results. Cleanup is solid, but also try Remove.bg or Inpaint, which are available on the Play Store and work pretty similarly; the difference is that some models preserve background details better if there are people or complex elements behind the watermark. Pixelation usually shows up if the watermark is large or if the background is very detailed (skies, water, sand), so if your photos from Cartagena have a lot of architecture or people in the background, you might see some distortion, but nothing too bad if the watermark isn't huge.
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