What you need to know
- MaskerAid is an app for putting emojis onto photos.
- Emojis can be placed over people's faces to protect their privacy.
- You can use emojis to annotate photos before sharing them.
Have you ever wanted to add an emoji to a photo and found it way more difficult than it ought to be? That's why you need MaskerAid in your life!
Like all good apps, MaskerAid was created to fix a very specific problem — developer Casey Liss wanted to be able to place emojis over faces and found it wasn't as easy as it could be. The result is MaskerAid, an app that uses machine learning to look at your photo and then work out where faces are. Choose an emoji and the app will use it to cover a face. You can then move it around and resize it as needed, too.
When you load an image with MaskerAid, it will AUTOMATICALLY detect all the faces in that photo, and obscure them with an emoji. Using MaskerAid, it's quick and easy to obscure the faces of children, shy friends, coworkers, or randos that are in your photos.
While the privacy of kids and adults alike is an obvious use for MaskerAid, there are plenty of other reasons to use it. In fact, you can use MaskerAid for almost anything. One suggestion would be to use the app to annotate photos with emojis ready to be posted to Twitter or sent over iMessage. If you have a photo and an emoji in mind, MaskerAid can combine the two.
You can add MaskerAid to your collection of apps for iPhone and iPad now. It's Available for download for free (opens in new tab) but is limited to a single emoji. Unlocking all emojis is a $2.99 in-app purchase via the App Store and it's a move well worth considering.
You can learn more about MaskerAid and the reasons behind its development in Casey's announcement post, too.
Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.
Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.
