Why there is no app, and why that is unlikely to change
Fawkes is a research tool from the University of Chicago SAND Lab, distributed as a desktop binary and a Python package. Cloaking is compute-bound: it runs a model over your image repeatedly to find a perturbation, which takes minutes per photo on a laptop CPU and needs a few hundred megabytes of model weights downloaded before it can start at all.
Neither of those fits comfortably in a phone app. The weights are large for a mobile download, the computation would drain a battery noticeably, and the researchers built a tool for their paper rather than a consumer product with two app-store listings to maintain. People keep looking for the app because the photo they want to protect is on the phone. It does not exist.
Route one: move the photo to a computer
This is the free route and it is the one we would recommend if you have a computer and an evening. AirDrop, a cable, Google Photos, email it to yourself — any of them. Then run Fawkes locally, and move the cloaked file back.
The advantage is not just cost. Your photograph never leaves your own machine, which on privacy specifically beats every hosted option including ours. The cost is setup and patience.
Route two: do it in the phone browser
A hosted service does the computation on a server, so the phone only has to upload a file and download one. That is the only way this happens on the phone itself, and it is what this site does.
Be clear-eyed about the trade. A copy of your photograph exists on someone else’s server, at least briefly. We delete the original and the output after processing and do not require an account for a single photo — but if that trade is unacceptable to you, route one exists and is free.
The iPhone problem nobody mentions: HEIC
By default an iPhone saves photographs as HEIC rather than JPEG. Most tools that accept an image — ours included — will reject it, and the error you get is rarely clear about why.
Two fixes. For one photo: open it in Photos, tap Share, choose Copy Photo, and paste it into the upload — iOS converts it on the way out. Permanently: Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible, which saves new photographs as JPEG from then on.
This catches people constantly and it has nothing to do with cloaking. It is worth checking first whenever a photo upload fails on an iPhone, on any site.
What the platform does to your file after you upload it
This matters more on a phone than anywhere else, because phone apps are the most aggressive re-encoders. Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and the rest all resize and re-compress what you give them, and adversarial protection lives in exactly the fine detail that compression throws away.
You cannot prevent it. You can avoid making it worse: upload the protected file directly rather than a screenshot of it, do not send it through a messaging app first, and do not scale it down yourself. Every extra encode costs protection before the platform has even started.
Sending a cloaked photo to yourself over WhatsApp before uploading it elsewhere is the most common way people accidentally undo their own work.