WipeMark

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Remove an emoji from a photo

Erase the emoji or sticker you put on a photo and lost the original of. It works well over backgrounds. It cannot reveal what was hidden underneath.

Drop a photo to clean up

From your gallery or camera

JPG · PNG · WebP · HEIC — up to 25 MP

  • Never stored
  • No watermark
  • No sign-up
Try one

Works well on

  • Date stampsOld camera dates in a corner
  • App badgesOn photos and exports you made
  • Text overlaysCaptions you no longer want
  • PeopleStrangers behind you

How to do it

  1. 1Look for the original firstCheck your camera roll, cloud backup or the app's drafts. An unedited original is always better than any fill.
  2. 2Paint over the emojiCover the emoji or sticker completely, including any white outline or drop shadow around it.
  3. 3Erase and judge it honestlyIf it sat on sky, a wall or a table, the fill will look natural. If it covered a face, expect a made-up result.

What happens when you erase an emoji

An emoji added to a photo replaces the pixels underneath it. Once the edited image is saved, the original pixels are gone from that file. No eraser, AI or otherwise, can bring them back. What WipeMark's eraser does is fill the marked area with something that fits its surroundings. It sends only the area around your mark, at most 1024 pixels, to its server, where LaMa, an inpainting model, makes that fill.

That makes the result depend almost entirely on what the emoji was covering.

  • Over background: sky, a wall, a table, grass, a car seat. The fill looks natural, often hard to spot.
  • Over clothing or hair: usually fine for small emojis, softer for big ones.
  • Over a face: the eraser invents skin, eyes or a mouth that fit the area. It will not look like the real person.

Look for the original first

Before you erase anything, look for the unedited photo. It is often still around:

  • Camera roll. Many apps save the edited version as a new file and leave the original untouched.
  • Cloud backups. Google Photos, iCloud Photos and similar services may have the original from before you edited it.
  • App drafts. Story and post editors sometimes keep drafts.
  • The person who sent it. If a friend added the emoji, they may still have the original.

An original will always beat a fill.

Marking an emoji well

Emojis and stickers usually have extra parts around them: a white sticker border, a drop shadow or a soft glow. Cover all of it. Press B for the brush and size it with the bracket keys so you can paint the outline in one or two strokes, or press X and draw a box if the emoji sits on plain background. Press Enter to erase.

For a large emoji, erase from the outside in. Mark the outer ring first, erase, then mark the center on the result. Each pass gets more real surroundings to fill from.

Problems and fixes

A white ring remains. That is the sticker border. Erase again with a mark that covers it.

The fill repeats a pattern. A big emoji over a textured surface can come back as a stamped-looking repeat. Erase in smaller sections.

Part of someone's face looks wrong. The emoji overlapped a face. Make the mark as small as possible so more of the real face remains, or crop the photo so the face is outside the frame.

Respect why the emoji was there

People cover faces with emojis to protect privacy, especially for children. Removing an emoji from your own photo to tidy it up is fine. Using any tool to uncover someone else's face is not, and with an eraser it would not work anyway: it would produce a made-up face, not the real one.

Which format to download

Download JPG for phone photos, PNG for screenshots or if you will keep editing, and WebP for a smaller file to share. The download is the full size of the image you uploaded.

Questions people ask

Can I remove an emoji from a photo and see what was under it?

No tool can show what was really under an emoji, because those pixels were replaced when the emoji was added. An eraser fills the area with a believable guess based on the surroundings. That works well for background and badly for faces.

How do I remove an emoji I added to my own photo?

First look for the unedited original in your camera roll or backup. If you only have the edited copy, drop it into the eraser above, paint over the emoji including its outline, and press Erase. The area is filled from the surroundings in a few seconds.

Why does the face look strange after removing the emoji?

The eraser never saw the face behind the emoji, so it invents something that fits the skin and hair around it. Eyes, mouths and expressions cannot be rebuilt accurately. If the emoji covered most of a face, the result will not look like the person.

Can I remove an emoji from someone else's photo to see their face?

No, and you should not try. People often add emojis to hide faces on purpose, for example to protect a child's privacy. The eraser would only invent a face anyway, not reveal the real one.

Does it work on stickers and GIF-style overlays in stories?

It works on any still image, including a screenshot or saved story frame. It does not work on video or animated stickers.