Updated Photos App: New Features You're Missing

0:00 This month, the iPhone photos app is going to get some really nice updates. And whether you're looking to buy one of the new iPhones that are coming out or you're keeping your existing iPhone, most of these features are going to apply to everyone using the new iPhone software, that's iOS 27. And by the way, that will work on phones going all the way back to the iPhone 11. Now, this software update is of course going to come pre-installed on the iPhones that come out this year. That's going to be announced on September 9th, which is only days away from the time of this video coming out. There's going to be some new editing tools, some new organization features, sharing improvements, and some other nice additions, too. And many of these features are also going to be coming to the new Mac software and the new iPad

0:45 software, depending on which model you have. So, if you want to get the most out of the Apple Photos app and the new features coming out this month, check this out. My name is Dan Fox and over the last 32 years, I've built a career in corporate and consumer technology. On my YouTube channel here, I keep it simple and easy to follow without all the tech talk. So, let's talk about the Photos app in Apple's latest iPhone software. Once again, that's iOS 27. Now, based on the way Apple's given these updates over previous years, we can expect to see it available for everyone by Monday, September the 14th at the latest. And you can check anytime by going into your iPhone settings, then selecting general,

1:31 and then selecting software updates. If there's an update available for your phone, it'll pop up here. The first three features that I'm going to mention today are exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, and any newer iPhone. But all of the rest of the features that I'm going to cover today should work on iPhones going all the way back to the iPhone 11. Once again, that's once you have iOS 27 installed. There's a new feature now that literally allows you to rotate a photo around in 3D space. This one's kind of hard to explain, but let's say you took a photo and you kind of wish you would have held your phone a little bit higher, little bit lower, or maybe off to one side a bit more. Well, now you can go back and do this later, even after you've taken the photo. This is really cool and it works like this.

2:17 So, once you get the photo open that you want to edit, you're going to select the edit button here and then you're going to select the tools button right here. Then select the reframe button right here. You'll notice a pop-up at the bottom after your photo is scanned that says touch and drag to adjust the perspective. Use two fingers to pan, zoom, or rotate. I'm going to keep it simple here by using one finger and then just swiping around until I get the angle I want. This is pretty wild because you can see it's actually changing the perspective of the photo. You can be as extreme as you want here. I found it looks a lot more realistic if you just make it subtle. Once you get it where you want it, you just select the reframe button, give it a minute to reframe your photo, and your iPhone will fill in the gaps around the edges. You'll notice over on the left where

3:03 that tree is, the iPhone will fill that in here in just a moment. Now, this can take more or less time depending on how complex the photo is and how extreme you've changed the angle. Again, if you get too extreme with the change here, it can start looking really weird. Once it's done, you can tap the screen once to see the original. It will immediately switch back to reframe so you can get an idea of a before and after. Once you're happy with the edit, all you have to do is hit the checkbox in the upper right-hand corner and then hit done in the upper right-hand corner. And as always with any edits in the Photos app, if you decide later you want to revert back to the original, you can do that anytime by hitting the edit button again, then hitting the revert button up in the upper right, and then hitting revert to original. You can even come back and do this years later. Now, this is a nice

3:49 way to make subtle edits to fix photos that might have been just a bit off in terms of the framing. Now, similarly, in the same section here, you can now extend photos, too. So, let's say you already took the shot, and now you kind of wish you would have been a little bit further away from the subject, maybe to get a little more of the surroundings. Now, you can basically zoom out on your iPhone, and it will fill in the remaining space. So, just like before, go into the photo you want to edit, and then hit the edit button here, but this time, after you hit the tools button here, select the extend button here in the middle. Then, you're just going to take two fingers and pinch out to get it extended as far as you want. There is a limit on how far you can go. Once you get it to where you want it, say you want to be zoomed out maybe this far, I'm going to hit the extend button. Then, it'll take

4:36 a minute or two to extend your photo, depending on how complex the photo is, it may take a little more or a little less time. I'm going to speed this up a bit. Once it's done, you can tap the screen just like before to see the original. So, if I tap, there's the original. There's the extended version. Again, there's the original. And again, there's the extended version. Once you're happy with it, I'm going to hit the check box in the upper right-hand corner, then I'm going to hit done in the upper right-hand corner, and there's your extended photo. And that was a very good and very large margarita. Now, if you're not already familiar with the cleanup tool, it's been around already since iOS 26, that was iPhone's last update last year. This tool allows you to quickly remove something from a photo. So, say someone photo-bombed you, or maybe there's an object in the background that

5:22 you just want to remove, that's what this tool is for. But, if you've used cleanup previously, then you probably know how sometimes it really doesn't work that well. Well, with this update, you now have options to fine-tune the cleanup process, and it works so much better than before. So, yet again, we're going to go into the photo we want to edit, and then select the edit button right here, then again, select the tools button right here, but this time, select the cleanup button on the far left. You'll notice the message at the bottom that says, "Tap, brush, or circle what you want to remove. Pinch to pan and zoom." And notice that the guy in the background has already been highlighted in white. This is Apple Photos guessing at what it thinks you want to remove from the photo. Now, before we go through the process of

6:07 removing something, I want to point out up here at the top where it says high quality. This is the new improved version of the cleanup tool. If I select high quality here, and now here you see fast, that is the old version of the cleanup tool. It works much faster, but it doesn't work nearly as well. The auto section at the top is where you just allow Apple Photos to go ahead and remove what it thinks you want to remove. For this example, I'm showing you the new high quality mode, so let's proceed. Now, I'm going to pinch zoom in so I can work with a little more detail here. Now, because it auto selected the person, if this is the only thing I wanted to remove, I could just single tap on them and they would disappear. But, I also want to remove the luggage cart. And one thing to note here, as soon as you start dragging your finger over other items on the screen, it will

6:54 stop selecting the item that had automatically selected before. So, in this case, when I start dragging my finger over the luggage cart, it will deselect the person and I'll have to go back and select them again. So, I'm just going to take one finger and start dragging it on the luggage cart. You don't have to be perfect. Apple Photos will figure out what you mean. So, as soon as I let go, it selected the whole cart, but notice it deselected the person. So, now I'm going to do the same thing, drag one finger on his legs, drag one finger on his upper body, and notice I'm not doing it perfectly, but it's auto detecting what I want to select. And now that everything is selected, you can see it highlighted, I'm just going to select the cleanup button. Takes it a few minutes again, depending on the complexity of the photo. Once it's done, you'll get a message at the bottom of the screen that says, "Objects in your scene have been removed. Tap and

7:41 hold to see the original. I'm going to pinch zoom back out so I can see the whole photo and then I'm going to tap and hold for a minute to see the original. There it is. I'm going to let go. Tap and hold again just to get a before and after. Letting go again. I'm happy with it so I'm going to hit the check box and then done again in the upper right hand corner. And here's my updated wedding photo without the guy or the luggage cart in the background. Now one last quick note about the three features I've mentioned so far. These three tools do use AI so it's not always going to come out exactly right. Sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error to get it just right. Now this next feature here I have found really useful. It's called save video frame as a photo. Now you could previously take a screenshot of a video after you recorded

8:28 it but the quality of that screenshot wasn't nearly as good as the quality of the video that it came from. And if you aren't aware, there's also been a photo button in the camera app so that you can take a photo while you're recording a video without having to stop the video from recording. Now this is still a really handy feature but even using this tool, the quality of the photo that you get from the video is not nearly as good as the quality of the video. But this new feature, it's called save video frame as photo again, you can save a frame of a video that you already recorded using the same high resolution of the original video frame. And this makes those images created from a video look so much better. Now this one's super easy. Just open the video you want to get a frame from and

9:14 then swipe your finger back and forth through the timeline. In my case, it's actually the first frame of the video. Let go and then hit the three dots in the upper right hand corner. Select save video frame as photo. You'll get the message right here that it's saved the video frame. You'll notice right away when you go back and look at the photo that'll now be in your camera roll. The quality is so much higher than a screenshot or even that dedicated photo button when recording a video. Now, to my eye this looks much closer to the quality you would have gotten if you just took a regular photo with the photo app. This is really nice. The Photos app also gets a much more capable built-in slideshow maker. Now, bear with me if you think that's silly because honestly, I have never used a slideshow maker before. I have personally never found it to be very useful, but now when you're making a

10:00 slideshow, after you select which album or which collection or just a group of photos you want to use, there's some fine-tuning you can do with transition styles and music and such, but the thing that makes it so useful now to me is you can save the finished slideshow as a video. Now, this one's incredibly simple. You're just going to open your library of photos or in this case for me, I've gone into an album. Doesn't matter where you start, but if you hit the select button in the upper right-hand corner, then select all the photos or videos or photos and videos that you want to add to a slideshow, and then click dots in the upper right-hand corner, and in the menu select start slideshow. When the slideshow starts to play, just tap on the screen and then hit customize at the bottom of the screen.

10:46 Select transition and duration, and here you have menu options where you can change the transition. That's the way the photos or videos in your slideshow go from one to the other. This applies to all of them. You can also change the total length of the slideshow using the slider right here. And if you scroll up a bit, this last setting is how you set how long you want each photo to be on during the slideshow. Again, this applies to all of them. You can't do this individually. Once you're done making any changes here, you hit the check mark in the upper right-hand corner. And from this screen, select customize once more, select music, and then you select choose a song. You can select from your Apple Music library or from soundtracks that are built in. I'm not going to bother changing this because I can't play it without getting some copyright issues here anyway, but if you

11:33 made changes here, this check mark would be blue and you would select that to get back to this screen again. And now that we're done customizing the slideshow, you hit the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. When that menu pops down, you're going to hit share and then you're going to hit save video. Now, it may take it just a few minutes to save the video to your photo library, but once it does and you go back out to your photo library, you'll see the slideshow sitting there as a regular video. Now, one thing to note here, I made the slideshow holding my phone up and down like this or vertically. If I were to hold it sideways or horizontally when I made the video, then it will actually save the video in more of that widescreen format. Now, being able to save this as a video is a big change because the slideshow is no longer just something that plays temporarily inside

12:20 the Photos app. Once you save it, you can then send a copy to your family, to your friends, you can post it on social media or whatever. Now, if you use shared albums in the Photos app or if you intend to, I've got some good news and I've got some bad news. The good news is that shared albums will now store the full-resolution photos and videos, whereas up until now, the quality of photos and videos in shared albums was diminished. You can also now share albums with Android friends. This is something you could not do before this update. But the bad news is, while previously shared albums did not take up any of your iCloud storage space, now they do. So, if you've been using shared albums to save photos and videos outside of your iCloud storage plan, you can't do

13:06 that anymore. But there's one important distinction here. For all of your existing lower-resolution shared albums, they still won't take up your iCloud storage space. So, if you just leave them alone, they'll be fine. Hey, if you're finding this video helpful at all, giving it a quick like really does drive traffic to my channel, which helps me out a lot. Also, if you like no-nonsense tech help like this, consider subscribing. I really appreciate it. Now, if you use iCloud with the Photos app, this one's really useful. And if you're not familiar with iCloud for photos, this basically is a setting that backs up a copy of all your photos and videos onto Apple's iCloud servers. It also keeps your photos library in sync across all your Apple devices. So, take photos on your iPhone, go to your Mac or

13:51 your iPad and all those photos will eventually be there. But, sometimes this sync takes a while, especially if you took a bunch of photos and videos at once on your phone, sometimes it takes a while for it to show up on your other devices. If you don't want to wait and you want to get those files over there sooner, this new feature, which is called sync immediately, will do just that by prioritizing the synchronization of iCloud photos and videos for the rest of the day. Then, in the next day starts, it'll switch back to the regular normal iCloud syncing. To turn on sync immediately for the day, open your iPhone settings and scroll all the way to the bottom until you see apps. Click on that, and then you can scroll all the way down to photos or select a P over here on the right, which will jump to the P section of your apps. Then, scroll

14:36 down until you see photos. Now, just select on photos. And here in the main screen, you'll see where it says sync immediately off. Select that. And then select for today. Now, for the next 12 hours, sync immediately will stay on and then it will switch back to off. Now, one thing to note here is this sync immediately feature can use more battery and it will use your cellular data if you're not on Wi-Fi. It'll also pause if your phone goes into low power mode or low data mode is enabled. Otherwise, this is a super useful feature for some of us. Now, you may have noticed that your photos in the Photos app are stored in the library. It's not called your camera roll. Now, this is because photos can include

15:22 screenshots, photos you downloaded from the internet, maybe sent to you from other people. But, if you just want to see the photos that you yourself have captured, like a traditional camera roll, there's a new utility called captured by me. This filters out things like screenshots, images sent from others, photos you downloaded from the internet, and it will include photos you took on your previous iPhone, too, as long as those photos are still in your photo library. Now, this one's really easy. Just open the Photos app, make sure you're scrolled all the way to the bottom where you can see collections here, and select on the Collections button. Then, scroll down just a bit to the utility section, and then scroll over just a little so you can see right here where it says "Captured by me."

16:08 Select on that, and these are all the photos and videos that were captured just by you, not those that were sent to you or screenshots or downloaded. This is simple little thing, but it's quite useful. Although, there are a lot more utilities and features in the Photos app with iOS 27, these are the first ones I found to be the most useful. I'll do some more videos on this topic. I'll try to keep them about this length, so it's not a really long video to sit through. I'll also be doing videos soon with the new iPhones in hand, the new features and updates coming to Mac and to iPad. So, if you're interested in this type of stuff, stick around. Apple's new iPhone event is only 3 days away, at least from the date of me posting this video. So, if you're considering getting one of the new iPhones or any of the other stuff that

16:55 Apple's expected to announce, let me know in the comments below. I'll be making a short video on the day of the announcement, that's September 9th, right after the event is over, to highlight what was announced and what we can expect. So, if you don't feel like sitting through the whole announcement, you can come back here to watch a quick recap. Okay, that's it. Thank Thank so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.