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The photo I want to use has someone else in it

Search this and you get erasers. Photoroom, BeFunky and Adobe will take the other person out in one tap, and they do it well. Every one of them answers the same question: how do I remove them. Almost nothing answers the question that came first, which is whether the photo is worth using at all. Those are two different questions, and the second one has a wrong answer far more often.

There are three things you can do. Leave the other person in, crop them out, or erase them. Each costs something, and each cost shows up in the image itself. That last part is the useful bit, because it means the result can be checked rather than argued about.

Leaving them in

The cost here is recognition. A stranger looks at a first photo briefly. The first thing they do with it is work out whose profile this is. Two people in the frame, neither one clearly the subject, and that is where the attention goes.

Tinder built a feature around this problem. Photo Selector asks for a selfie so it can recognise your face, then picks candidates from your camera roll. Lauren Forristal reported the launch for TechCrunch on 17 July 2024. Her piece says the tool curates selfies. It also says Tinder recommends fewer group pictures, because they can confuse matches about whose profile it is.

Notice the shape of that concern. It is not that having friends looks bad. It is that the opening photo has one job, and a second person in the frame competes for it. A photo with other people can still earn a place further down a profile. It is a poor place to start.

There is also the other person to consider. Tinder’s community guidelines tell members not to post images from other people without consent. Whether that rule covers your holiday photo is arguable. Asking your friend costs nothing and settles it.

Cropping, and the arm it leaves behind

A crop is subtraction, and it subtracts two things.

The first is pixels, and this one is measured rather than judged. Our check reads the long edge of the file you upload. Below 640 pixels, light and focus comes back Weak. Below 1280 it comes back Fair. A tight crop of a phone photo reaches those numbers easily. You are throwing away most of the frame to keep one person in it.

That loss is permanent, and this is where we have to be blunt about our own product. No correction restores detail the file never held. We refuse those repairs rather than sell them, because the alternative is inventing a face and charging for it.

The second thing a crop subtracts is most, but rarely all, of a person. What stays is a forearm over your shoulder, a hand at your waist, or half a head at the edge. Every advice page ranking for this question names that residue, and on this they are right. A limb with nobody attached does not read as tidy. It reads as something being kept back, which is a worse impression than the original photo ever made.

A hard crop can also push your own head against the frame edge. That is measured too. The face rating falls to Fair, and the finding says your face is cut off at the edge.

What we will not tell you about the other person

Most writing on this subject goes one step further. It tells you the leftover arm looks like an ex, and invites the reader to imagine who is missing.

We cannot do that, and we would not want to. The check never infers gender, age, ethnicity or a relationship. It never compares two photos of the same person against each other either. Those are constraints the whole product is built under, not a matter of phrasing. So the check can say that an arm is in the frame. It cannot say whose, and anything claiming otherwise is guessing at a stranger.

The useful half of the observation survives without the story. An unattached arm is a distraction whoever it belonged to, and that is enough to act on.

Erasing, and grading what comes back

The erasers work, and they have got much better. The question their pages do not ask is whether the output holds up once it is on a profile.

One of the six things our check rates is how natural the image looks. Its bottom level is for pictures that have stopped being a picture of a moment. The wording is specific: warped features, or a background that bends. That is exactly how an eraser fails. A straight railing that kinks where a shoulder used to be. A doorframe that bows. A patch of grass repeated in a visible tile.

Nobody scrolling ever names this. They are not thinking about editing tools. The picture looks faintly wrong, they do not know why, and they move on. So the useful move is to grade the eraser’s output rather than trust it. You can, because a bent railing is a property of the image, not a claim about you.

Removing somebody at the edge of a frame is a correction this product will attempt. It needs nothing but the photo, because the background behind them is already in the surrounding pixels. Compare that with a face hidden under a cap brim. There the missing part has to be rebuilt from your other photos.

Deciding, in order

The questions are worth taking in this sequence, because the early ones settle most cases before any tool is opened.

The option nobody sells

There is a fourth answer, and the eraser pages never offer it. Nothing gets sold at the end of it. Leave the photo alone and place it late in the profile, where a second person costs much less. Or keep it and publish something else.

Some photos are pictures of an evening rather than pictures of a person. The evening was good. Whether the photo does a job on a profile is a separate matter. No editing tool decides which of the two you have. Looking at the file honestly does.

A group photo works the same way, with the numbers moved. Which photo opens a profile is covered in Which photo should go first.

Written by Fottory, which generates dating photos from photos of your own face. The first two are free, and none of the advice above depends on using it.