PhotoKit AI Review: Are Its One-Tap Edits Actually Any Good?
PhotoKit AI promises one-tap editing functions, but is it really that good? Dive into our hands-on review of this freemium photo editor covering all pros and cons.
AI | Software | By Tania Braukamper | Last Updated: April 15, 2026
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Many different apps are trying to become the next Photoshop or Lightroom for mobile, largely due to the proliferation and advancement of AI editing.
PhotoKit AI is no different. On the surface, it promises one-tap editing capabilities that produce ready-to-use photos for social media posts.
But is it any good? Let’s find out.
PhotoKit AI App Basics
The first thing that threw me for a loop was the app’s name.
PhotoKit is not exactly a unique name, and you’ll likely find at least a few different apps on the app stores and even an entirely separate browser platform with the same name.
The AI app I’m reviewing is listed as PhotoKit AI Photo Editor (iOS/Android) and has been on the store since 2020, well before AI editing became mainstream.
From these, it’s safe to assume that some of the features of the app predate the AI craze and are what are “bulking up” the app’s usefulness as a photo editor first, with AI content second.
Another notable point is that most of the app’s features function offline, so you don’t require an internet connection for basic editing. However, you’ll need to use a connection to download templates or assets that the AI uses for changes.
The actual suite of features can be considered a bit lopsided. Some features that you’ll likely use more often for basic editing are locked behind a premium subscription (or you get a large watermark that makes the image unusable).
With this in mind, let’s discuss the quality of some of the most prominent features.
PhotoKit AI Background Features
Remove Background
This is one of those features that has been paradoxically put as premium-only if you want to use it on its own.
Luckily, since most other options actually change the background in one way or another, they will remove the background by proxy (making the app still usable for free).
As far as the actual quality of this AI background remover is concerned, you may run into a few issues.
Let’s start with a sample of what the actual background remover editor looks like.
From there, you need to access the “Cutout Modify” option, which has been curiously placed above the actual editing options, closer to the app’s overall menu.
You do get a tutorial/guidance notification for it every time you load the app, which I found to be quite helpful.
The cutout editor itself is relatively extensive, giving you decent control over what you want to include or exclude from a picture.
However, if you want to use the AI features to the fullest, the quality of the actual background remover can be a bit disappointing.
While the AI mostly does a solid job separating the subject from the background, PhotoKit doesn’t exactly deliver pixel-perfect details, especially on the edges where you encounter hair or clothing.
In most cases, I ended up with portraits where the hair was roughly chopped up and I needed to use the manual mode to restore some details.
For better results, I had to use the manual cutout option, reduce brush size to a minimum, overcorrect, then apply border smoothing to blend my subject more naturally.
That ended up being a fair bit of work.
However, if you do want an image with a background removed, the app can technically do the trick, especially when the subject is much more distinctly separated. In those cases, the app’s advertised 5-second background removals were quite good.
Change Background
The background changer is essentially an extension of the background remover feature, where you can either add a stock background from the app’s gallery or choose a new one.
I’ll give PhotoKit credit where it’s due in terms of background availability, since it has many natural-looking backgrounds to choose from – most of them available for free.
However, where it falls short is the advanced options.
One of the major issues with the app is that there’s no way to naturally crop the background to fit a specific ratio or line it up with the “original image.”
This might not sound like a huge deal when inserting a full-body shot, but it can get tedious if you work with a close-up portrait that is cut off at any of the edges.
The app simply can’t compensate for the disparity in aspect ratios. Even some of the simplest background designs come in “full” 16:9 ratios that can’t be cropped for a vertical image.
Instead, I needed to save the image, locate it in my gallery, then crop it using another editing software (even the stock editor worked here).
Given that the app suggests one-tap edits, the lack of follow-through is a bit concerning.
Somewhat curiously, there’s a way to bypass this for a few templates through the separate “Shine” feature in the app.
The Shine feature puts the subject in the foreground, increases contrast, and adds a small white border and a shadow around it.
By using the manual editing options at the bottom of the UI to undo the “Shine” visual effects, I was able to effectively “mask” the background into a usable crop that the standard tools couldn’t achieve.
3D Backgrounds and Stickers
This is where the AI leans into the more fun and creative aspects of photo editing.
In effect, the subject will “poke” out of the top or side of a background template. Similar to the background changer, there are many different templates you can use, which can be quite fun to play with.
But the 3D background changer also shares the aspect ratio problem. Since the backgrounds are stuck on a certain ratio, they won’t fit every image, and there are practically no post-setup editing options.
In fact, the original image can’t even be changed much, as I could only move it around the template and rotate it.
On the plus side, the sheer range of available images for the background means that you’ll usually find something that either just fits or makes up for the lack of post-editing features.
The 3D sticker portion works on a similar level, attaching a sticker that either wraps around the subject or has parts of it in the foreground.
And like the 3D backgrounds, it comes with a few ups and downs of its own.
The positive side is that the sticker gallery is quite large, so you can usually find something that pairs well with the image’s aspect ratio or original zoom level.
On the downside, most of the stickers work only with subjects that are far away. Due to the lack of editing options, stickers can zoom in or out, but some larger ones will simply clip out of the image.
Technically, stickers can also change color and come with standard editing options such as saturation, brightness, and contrast.
In practice, the “hue” changer is a bit minimalist, with the 0-100 scale producing unnatural results.
Highlight Subject
Highlight is a fairly simple editing option that dims the background in various levels based on the settings.
While it looks a bit simplistic, it has a few practical uses, the first of which is being able to extract the subject without the large watermark associated with the background remover.
I managed to do this by subtly changing the transparency of the highlighter to the point where the edges started blending in with the introduced “darkness.”
The end result might not be a full background removal, but it creates a natural highlighting effect that can be useful for further editing or as a social media profile picture.
Subject-Background Merging Features
PhotoKit offers a few different features that work in slightly different ways to combine an image with another one.
Double Exposure
Double exposure layers another image on top of the original one, with the “borders” of the new image being the original image’s background.
From there on, you can play with the transparency of both the “exterior” and “interior” portions to create unique and eye-catching effects.
Notably, this feature works a bit in reverse compared to all the others, keeping the background as-is and toning down the transparency of the subject.
Additionally, this is one of the features where the app’s simple editing options work to its advantage.
Due to the large template gallery for interior images (or the ability to choose a custom one from your phone), you can achieve good results just by scrolling through the templates and adjusting the transparency setting a few notches.
The AI does the rest, creating just enough accents from the original exterior to make the result great.
One notable downside of the editor is that it’s a bit difficult to move the interior image around, particularly when zooming. If you move your fingers just a bit far, you might rotate the image, and there’s no option to align it with the original photo again unless you reset the entire project.
Drip
The Drip effect is likely one of the hallmarks of the app, creating a fun twist on traditional stickers or 3D backgrounds.
With the Drip option, you can choose how much of the subject to keep, with a healthy amount of both “dripping” templates and backgrounds to get many usable combinations.
You can also use a plain color background to create 3D-looking stickers of your face or other images.
Since the app is quite responsive and doesn’t require a lot of back and forth with the AI editor, you can also quickly cycle through the various drip effects, which makes previews quite snappy.
Mixo
As its name might suggest, the Mixo option combines different aspects of your original image with backgrounds and stickers.
What I particularly liked here is that many Mixo effects come with unique preset editing options, such as immediately putting the original image in grayscale for more contrast against a colorful sticker.
With what feels like hundreds of combinations, you’re unlikely to run out of experiments, and most create artistic results without any post-editing needed.
AI Image Generation
The AI image generator is one of the most and least exciting options I’ve used here.
For one, the text-to-image generation is actually solid, detail-wise. While the image I received is quite obviously AI-generated, it’s fair to say that the AI doesn’t leave too many obvious artifacts if you are precise with your prompt.
But that’s where the benefits end.
For one, the free trial is practically unusable since the app plasters a huge watermark across the middle.
Secondly, the subscription puts you on a drip of monthly credits that’s typically only good enough for less than one higher-quality image per week.
Technically, you can use the basic image option for 10 weekly images on a subscription, but its quality lags behind most other free AI image generators.
Photo Collages and Face Clips
The collage options are among the app’s more interesting features.
With both Photo Collages and Face Clips, the app extracts up to five images from your gallery.
For the collage, it places the images in predetermined positions across a myriad of collage templates, where the collage’s design directly depends on the number of images you choose.
What I particularly liked about this feature is the simplicity. All you have to do is choose the images and the template, and the app does the rest.
With only two options, one being adding an optional textbox and the other being applying special effects to each image or the collage itself (or changing color), you might feel limited in what you can do.
However, the collage effect is seamless and the template gallery deep enough that I could quickly find one that just worked and could just hit Save to start uploading it.
For the Face Clip feature, it cycles through the images, lining up the face on each of them to the best of its ability.
Face Clip also adds custom music (which is a bit tacky), but which you can thankfully remove.
The video has a few different styles, but they mainly change how often the images flip from one to another.
All styles also apply a filter that can’t be changed, which seems to depend on the particular backgrounds of the images and can ruin the result.
You’ll need to really experiment with this feature, and it’s one of the few options that takes a bit of time to load.
The Good and the Bad
One of the app’s biggest draws is that it is almost entirely free. While the lack of a subscription limits your template variety, you can still access most of the core features and export your images without a paywall.
The free version does include ads, but they’re mainly tucked away on a single part of the screen rather than being mandatory to watch before accessing a feature.
The watermark is a bit of a downer, of course. If you plan to use the app extensively for social media, the subscription may be worth the investment.
What I found a bit confusing is the UI. While navigating the menus is simple enough, and the app’s help function is useful, the layout feels disorganized, and you might need to hunt for a particular tool or option.
Additionally, the app’s basic editing options are extremely limited. The cropping feature in particular is nonexistent, which makes some options simply not work as elegantly as they could.
Finally, the app seems to be a bit resource-heavy and struggles with cache management, meaning old images can “ghost” onto new projects, and the app may crash after a long session.
The Verdict
As a small yet handy editing suite, I find PhotoKit AI to be a decent enough time investment if you want to play around with social media posts that rely on templates and fun stickers or background changes.
The background remover is pretty good when working on images that are not entire closeups, and the non-paid features all work as advertised most of the time.
If you’re a company or want to increase your social media presence, using the subscription option is likely going to be the only way forward (as it removes the bothersome watermark).
Since the bulk of the tool is free, there’s very little risk involved in trying it out anyway.
Tania Braukamper is an Australian-born writer who also loves to take pictures of sunsets and street scenes. She currently lives in Portugal.
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