Samsung Patents an Undo Button for AI-Edited Photos

Samsung has filed patent US 2026/0320875 A1, first reported by Patentlyze in June, describing an undo system for AI-edited photos — including cases where the original file has already been deleted. The filing lands amid a rush of AI photography patents: roughly 229 applications from major tech companies in under six months.

The problem Samsung targets is familiar to anyone shooting on a phone. You remove a passerby with an AI tool, delete the original to free storage, and the untouched frame is gone for good. The patent proposes a fix built directly into the image file.

What does the patent actually describe?

The system writes two sets of hidden notes into the file. One lives in the metadata layer (the invisible section of every JPEG and HEIC that already stores date, time, location and camera settings). The first set logs what happened: which AI edits ran, when, and which parts of the image changed.

The second set holds the data needed to rebuild what was there before. Samsung outlines several storage formats:

• A text prompt, such as "remove people" or "remove spot," which an AI tool can reverse
• Low-resolution pixels of the removed area, which AI can upscale back to full size
• A compressed numeric fingerprint of the original area, expandable later by an AI decoder
• Stored pixel differences between versions, which could rebuild the original without running an AI model at all — though the patent notes this works only in limited cases

The gallery would carry an "AI Revert" label on such images. The phone reads its hidden notes, runs an AI model on the edited photo plus the stored clues, and offers save or cancel options. A slider would let users step backward through multiple edit stages — useful when an image has been changed more than once.

The broader patent race

Samsung's undo button is one piece of a much larger filing wave, as tracked by Patentlyze. The counts break down like this:

• Google — 69 filings, focused on teaching AI to understand whole scenes during editing, including context, lighting and spatial relationships. Other filings cover a camera that reframes automatically around whatever you tap, plain-English photo editing, and turning a handful of product shots into unlimited advertising scenes
• Adobe — 47 filings, including automated control over selected parts of a photo, an AI system that erases glass reflections, and one that identifies and adjusts edge quality after a subject cutout
• Samsung and Nvidia — 30 filings each, with Samsung on smartphone editing and Nvidia on video cleanup
• Sony — 17 filings, covering color, light and consistency across video frames, a camera that adjusts its own settings from user feedback over time, and an AI video system that stops faint duplicate artifacts from spreading between frames

What does this change for working photographers?

In the near term, not much — this is a patent, not a shipped product, and patents describe intent, not release dates. The longer-term signal matters more. A retrievable edit trail makes heavy AI editing reversible, which encourages experimentation on client work. It also formalizes what many photographers already suspect: the file you receive may not be the file that was captured.

The industry trajectory behind the filings is blunt. Manual culling is the target. These companies want machines doing the hours of thinking photographers currently bill for. Wedding photographers may welcome faster workflows, but the flip side is client expectations catching up — same-evening delivery of edited wedding files is not a distant scenario. Until these systems ship, the practical move is watching which filings become products.