Remove a sticker from a photo

Two kinds of sticker

People search for this for two different reasons, and the eraser handles both the same way.

Stickers added in an app. Story and chat apps let you drop stickers, GIF-style decorations, location tags and time stamps onto a photo. If you saved the photo with the sticker on it and no longer have the plain version, the sticker is now part of the image.

Physical stickers in a real photo. A price tag on a mug you are selling, a brand label on a laptop, a barcode on a box, a parking permit on a car windshield in your own photo.

In both cases you paint over the sticker and the eraser fills it from what surrounds it. Emojis work the same way and have their own page, which includes a checklist for finding your unedited original. Check that first: an original always beats a fill.

What the eraser can and cannot do

WipeMark sends only the area around your mark, at most 1024 pixels, to its server, where LaMa, an inpainting model, fills the marked part from its surroundings. Your browser places the patch back into the full-size photo, and nothing is stored.

It is important to be clear about what that means. The eraser cannot reveal what was really under a sticker. Those pixels are gone from the file. It paints something plausible that matches the area around the hole.

• Small sticker on a plain background: sky, a wall, a tabletop, grass, a car seat. The fill usually looks natural.
• Medium sticker on clothing or hair: often fine, a little softer than the rest of the photo.
• Sticker over a face or most of a person: this cannot be recovered. The eraser will invent skin, features or clothing that fit the shapes around them, and the result will not look like the real person.

If a sticker covers most of the subject, cropping the photo or keeping the sticker is often better than a made-up fill.

Marking a sticker well

App stickers usually carry extras: a white die-cut border, a drop shadow, a glow or a speech bubble. Cover all of it. Leftover border pixels get blended into the fill and show up as a pale ring.

Press B for the brush and size it with the bracket keys, or press X and draw a box for a square label on a plain surface. Leave a small margin all round. Press Enter to erase.

For a large sticker, work from the outside in. Mark a ring around the edge, erase, then mark the middle on the result with Erase again. Each pass fills from real surroundings rather than from the previous guess.

Labels on your own products

A barcode or price sticker on a product you are photographing can often be erased if it sits on a plain, even surface. It works less well when the label crosses an edge, a seam or a printed design, because the eraser has to invent that detail. Text or artwork that was under a label cannot be rebuilt. The object removal page has more on which surfaces fill well and which do not. The text removal page covers the related case of lettering printed directly on a surface.

For a sale listing, the photo should still show the item as it really is. Removing a store price tag is a tidy-up. Hiding a scratch or a dent under a "removed sticker" is not.

Respect why a sticker was there

People put stickers over faces, house numbers and license plates on purpose, to protect privacy. Cleaning up a sticker on your own photo is fine. Trying to uncover something another person chose to hide is not, and with an eraser it would not work anyway: you would get a guess, not the real thing.

Which format to download

Download JPG for camera 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.