Hama
Hama is a free, browser-based AI eraser that removes unwanted people, objects, text and watermarks from photos. Brush over the area and the model rebuilds the background in seconds, with an inpainting API available for developers.
What is Hama?
Hama is an AI image editing service built around a single task: removing things from photographs. Published by the Korean company Sandoll Inc., it runs entirely in the browser. You drop an image onto the page, brush over whatever you want gone, a passer-by, a rubbish bin, a date stamp, a watermark, a blemish, and the model reconstructs the background underneath so the gap disappears.
The technique has a name, and the site uses it: image inpainting, the reconstruction of missing or damaged parts of an image. Hama's documentation goes further than most tools by naming the model behind it, LaMa, described in full as Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions, and presented as tuned to preserve the context and style of the surrounding image.
The pitch is deliberately narrow. There is no prompt box, no image generation and no background cut-out. What the site sells is that neither retouching skill nor expensive software is required: brushing is the whole interface. Uploads accept images of any size, the number of edits is unlimited and free, and results are announced in seconds. Downloads are where the ceiling sits, at 720px without an account and at HD through hama PRO, a tier unlocked by signing in with Google and described by the site as free for a limited time.
Beyond the editor, Hama publishes an inpainting API across five documentation pages. A caller posts an original image and a binary mask as multipart form data, in JPG or PNG up to 16 megapixels and 4 MB, and receives a PNG back within about thirty seconds. Keys are issued by email rather than self-service.
The site documents its own use cases at unusual length: travel photos, old prints, product shots, estate-agency listings, maps and street view, beauty retouching and design mockups. Several of those pages carry cautions rather than sales copy, warning that watermarks signal copyright and that over-retouching a property photo misrepresents it.
The interface is offered in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, and the site installs as a progressive web app. Sandoll Inc. acquired the service from Sandoll Square on 31 October 2024.
What it does
- Erase unwanted people from a photo
- Remove objects, defects and background distractions
- Delete text, watermarks, date stamps, logos and subtitles
- Retouch blemishes, wrinkles, scars and tattoos on a portrait
- Restore old, worn or damaged photographs
- Clean people and objects out of map and street-view imagery
- Call the inpainting model from your own application through the API
When to use Hama / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Hama is the right fit.
When to use Hama
- Anyone with no retouching skills who needs a passer-by, a bin or a date stamp gone from a personal photo
- E-commerce sellers and merchandisers cleaning up product shots, thumbnails and detail-page imagery
- Estate agents and property managers tidying listing photographs before publication
- Designers preparing mockups who need logos, decorations or stray objects stripped from reference images
- Developers who want to embed object removal in their own product through a documented inpainting API
When not to use Hama
- Anyone needing print-resolution output: downloads stop at 720px without an account and at HD with hama PRO
- Users looking for a background cut-out or transparent PNG, which Hama does not do at all
- Anyone wanting to generate images from a prompt rather than erase parts of an existing one
- Video editors and motion artists, since the tool handles still images only
- Organisations that require a GDPR posture, a signed DPA, a subprocessor list or a stated hosting country
How to use Hama
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open hama.app in a browser; no installation and no account are needed to start
- Drag and drop your image onto the upload area, or click it to pick a file
- If you would rather test first, pick one of the pre-loaded sample images and hit Try it out
- Adjust the brush size, and zoom in when the area to clean is small or detailed
- Brush over the person, object, text or blemish you want removed
- Cover a slightly larger area than the target, and include shadows, which the site says improves the result
- Let the model rebuild the background; the site announces a result in a few seconds
- If the erase is imperfect, brush the same spot again: repeated passes are the site's main quality tip
- Download the result, capped at 720px without an account
- Sign in with Google to unlock hama PRO and download at HD
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely free, with an unlimited number of edits and no account required to start
- No retouching skill needed: brushing over the unwanted area is the entire interface
- Fast, with results announced in seconds and uploads accepted at any image size
- Testable immediately through pre-loaded sample images, without uploading anything of your own
- A public, documented API with an architecture diagram and a worked process example
- The underlying model is named, LaMa, which is rare enough to be worth noting and can be checked
- Use-case pages that carry honest cautions, on copyright and on over-retouching property photos
Cons
- Output resolution is capped: 720px without an account, HD with hama PRO, a fixed 1280x720 through the API
- hama PRO is described as free only for a limited time, so the HD tier's future pricing is unknown
- No pricing page at all, yet the API documentation refers to HD under a Pro subscription
- Terms Article 15 assigns intellectual property in uploads and generated results to the company
- No GDPR mention, no DPA, no subprocessor list and no hosting country published
- Not a single email address on the hama.app domain: support and privacy run through three publisher domains
- The API key is obtained by emailing a person rather than through self-service, which slows integration
Pricing & Plans
Hama is offered free of charge. Editing is unlimited at no cost, and the premium tier, hama PRO, is obtained simply by registering free of charge; the site states explicitly that PRO is free for a limited time. No paid plan, amount, currency or billing period is published anywhere on the site, so no entry price can be quoted. The terms of use do contemplate service fees and an external payment processor, and the API documentation refers to HD output under a Pro subscription, but neither is accompanied by a published tariff.
- unlimited editing
- downloads capped at 720px
- free registration and Google sign-in
- HD downloads
- stated by the site to be free for a limited time
- key issued on request by email
- output fixed at 1280x720
- HD referred to a Pro subscription with no published price
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Hama handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on Hama's site. The term does not appear in the privacy policy, the terms of use, or any other page collected. The framework claimed instead is South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act, with the policy published under its Article 30 and in force since 31 October 2024. Users are granted rights of access, correction, deletion and suspension of processing, exercisable in writing, by email or by fax. A personal information protection officer is designated, Hyuk Lee, Vice President, alongside the IT Innovation Group. The redress routes listed are Korean: the Personal Information Dispute Mediation Committee, KISA's infringement report centre, the Supreme Prosecutors' Office and the National Police Agency. No EU Article 27 representative is named, and disputes involving users abroad go to the Seoul Central District Court.
Who owns the data?
Hama's terms are unusually blunt here. Article 15 states that intellectual property rights in data generated by the service, and in data posted or registered by the user, are attributed to the Company, Sandoll Inc. The terms define "Data" as material the user uploads and stores on the Company's servers plus anything derived from it by combination, modification or recomputation. Article 17 adds that the Company has no obligation to back up or return user data and disclaims responsibility for loss. Set against that clause, the FAQ promises that photos are never used for any other purpose, never shared with third parties and never published. The two statements sit uneasily together and the site does not reconcile them.
Reuse rights
Nothing on the site grants the user an explicit licence back over their own uploads or over the edited results. Article 15 assigns intellectual property in both to Sandoll Inc., so the terms do not confirm that outputs may be reused commercially without asking. In practice Hama is presented as a photo editor and the privacy policy states that the purpose of processing photo files is the generation and storage of editing results, with the FAQ adding that photos are not shared or published. Users who need contractual certainty for client work, stock submission or paid campaigns should seek written confirmation rather than rely on the published terms. The site also cautions, on its own use-case page, that watermarks and logos indicate a copyrighted image: erasing the mark does not clear the underlying rights, and checking the licence remains the user's responsibility.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Hama publishes no hosting location at all. Neither the privacy policy, the terms of use nor the acquisition notice names a country, a region or a data centre for stored photos and account data. What the policy does describe is a set of safeguards without geography: encryption of personal data and passwords, a restricted and trained group of handling staff, security software against hacking, an intrusion prevention system, controlled physical storage areas, and access logs retained for at least one year, or two years where more than 50,000 data subjects or sensitive data are involved. The governing jurisdiction is clear even where the servers are not: Sandoll Inc. is a Korean company, Korean law governs the terms, and the Seoul Central District Court has exclusive jurisdiction for users located abroad. One technical detail should not be mistaken for a hosting declaration: the domain resolves to an anycast content-delivery node located in the United States. That is the web front end, not a statement about where user images are held.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Hama.
- Article 15 of the terms attributes intellectual property in both your uploads and the generated results to Sandoll Inc., which matters for any commercial or client work
- hama PRO's HD downloads are stated to be free only for a limited time: today's free tier is a promotion, not a commitment, and no future price is published
- No GDPR mention, no DPA, no subprocessor list and no declared hosting country, which will block adoption in regulated or procurement-driven environments
- Erasing elements from photographs that are meant to document reality, news images, insurance or appraisal evidence, property listings, moves quickly from retouching into misrepresentation; the site itself warns about the property case
- Removing a watermark or a logo does not clear the copyright it signals, as the site's own use-case page points out; the legal exposure stays with the user
- The company has no obligation to back up or return user data, and photos are purged on a three-month cycle, so nothing uploaded should be treated as stored
- No contact address exists on the hama.app domain itself; support, privacy and API requests all route to three separate publisher domains, which makes verifying who you are writing to harder than it should be
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Essentially none for web use. Nothing to install, and no account is needed to edit an image and download it at 720px; a Google sign-in unlocks HD through hama PRO, and the site installs as a progressive web app. The API is another matter. A key must be requested by email rather than generated on demand, and the caller has to produce the binary mask themselves, at the original's resolution, in JPG, with values of 0 or 255, before posting both files. That mask requirement is where the integration work actually sits.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Hama
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is Hama?
Is Hama free?
What resolution can I download?
How many images can I edit?
How do I get a better erase?
What happens to the photos I upload?
Is there an API?
Does Hama comply with the GDPR?
Who is behind Hama?
What languages does the interface support?
Should you pick Hama?
Hama does one thing and does it without ceremony. As a free, no-account way to brush a stranger, a bin or a date stamp out of a photograph, it is hard to fault: uploads take any image size, edits are unlimited, and the result arrives in seconds. The fact that the site names its model, LaMa, and documents its own limitations is a mark of unusual candour in this category, as are the use-case pages that warn about copyright and about over-retouching estate-agency photos.
The real constraint is resolution. At 720px without an account, HD with hama PRO and a fixed 1280x720 through the API, Hama is a tool for screens rather than for print or for professional delivery. That ceiling, more than anything else, decides whether it fits a given workflow.
The governance deserves a careful read before commercial use. Article 15 of the terms attributes intellectual property in both uploaded content and generated results to Sandoll Inc.; the company disclaims any duty to back up user data; and there is no GDPR mention, no DPA, no subprocessor list and no stated hosting country. What exists instead is a full Korean PIPA framework, a named protection officer and a clear three-month retention rule for photos, which is more specificity than many free tools offer. Not a single contact address sits on hama.app itself, which is disconcerting until you find them on the publisher's domains.
The commercial picture is the open question. hama PRO is free for a limited time, the API documentation mentions a Pro subscription, and the terms contemplate service fees, yet no price is published anywhere. Treat today's free HD as a promotion rather than a guarantee, and Hama is a genuinely useful, narrowly focused utility backed by an established Seoul publisher.
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