Every now and then, an app comes along that’s so cool and brilliant you almost have to stop everything you’re doing and download it straight away. This is one of those apps. And hey, while you’re here, if you find this tip helpful, feel free to subscribe to my channel down below. There are loads more tips for your iPad and iPhone just waiting for you over there.

ClipDrop is a free app that you’ll need to install on your iPhone and your Mac. This also works on Android and PC as well, but I’m going to use my iMac for the demo. When you’ve installed the app in both places, you’re going to open it up on your phone. So, what ClipDrop does is it photographs an object in front of the camera, then uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to remove any trace of the background and it presents a really clear cut-out image to use in other applications. Tap on the screen and the machine learning will be applied to cut the pencil out really quickly. Then, I’m going to use my camera to point it towards the screen on my iMac and I’m going to press the Drop button at the bottom. That is then, amazingly, going to transfer that image almost instantly to my Mac, and from there I can simply drag-and-drop it into my Keynote and treat it like any other image. It genuinely feels like magic, and if this isn’t the future, I don’t know what is.

Let’s do it again to show you how easy this is. I’ve got a pair of scissors here; I’m going to tap onto the camera to photograph those scissors, it’s going to remove the background, and then I’m going to bring my iPhone up to my Mac screen and press Drop. Just like that, the scissors will show up with no background on my Mac screen. One more time, so let’s go and get the glue stick. Again, we’re going to get a photo of that glue stick to clip it out of the real world, and we’re going to drop it on the Mac.

I’ve never seen an app like this before, but I can think of so many thousands of possibilities to use this in my classroom and I’m sure in your life as well. Now, the app is free to begin with (you get ten clips for free) but then you can subscribe to use it unlimited for a year or a month at a time. Oh, and did I mention that you can even clip multiple objects at the same time as long as they all fit inside that viewfinder? I’ve tried it with two and three objects at the same time and it’s done an excellent job removing the backgrounds from all of them.

The other great thing to note is that you can save your clips to the Cloud Library that’s built into ClipDrop. And if you do that, you can open it up on any device where you’re signed in to get those images immediately. Or you can export it and save it in your Camera Roll or send it as a message – just like you would any image on iOS.