Camera Modes

The Camera app can capture six or seven kinds of photos and videos, depending on your phone model. By swiping your finger horizontally anywhere on the screen (not just on the mode labels), you switch among its modes. Here they are, from left to right:

• Time-Lapse speeds up your video yet somehow keeps it stable. You can reduce a two-hour bike ride into 20 seconds of superfast playback.

• Slo-Mo. You get a video filmed at 120 or 240 frames a second—so it plays back at one-quarter or one-eighth speed, incredibly smoothly. Fantastic for sports, tender smiles, and cannonballs into the pool.

• Video is your camcorder mode: 4K video on the 6s and later models, high definition on earlier ones.

• Photo is the primary mode for taking pictures.

• Portrait. This mode is available only on the 7 Plus, 8 Plus, and Face ID iPhone models, whose two camera lenses create a softly blurred background that looks super-professional. (The iPhone XR has only one lens on the back, but it simulates the same effect using clever software.)

• Square. Why would Apple go to the trouble of creating a whole camera mode devoted to taking square, not rectangular, pictures? Answer: Instagram, which prefers square images. (On the iPhone 11 Pro, Square mode is hiding in the proportion picker described in “Marking Up Your Photos”.)

• Pano. Captures super-wide-angle panoramic photos.

All these modes are described in this chapter, but in a more logical order: still photos first, and then video modes.

Tap to Focus

All right: You’ve opened the Camera app, and the mode is set to Photo. You may see a yellow box appear briefly on the screen.

It’s telling you where the iPhone will focus, the area it examines to calculate the overall brightness of the photo (exposure), and the portion that will determine the overall white balance of the scene (the color cast).

If you’re taking a picture of people, the iPhone tries to lock in on a face—up to 10 faces, actually—and calculate the focus and exposure so that they look right.

But sometimes there are no faces—and dead center may not be the most important part of the photo. The cool thing is that you can tap somewhere else in the scene to move that yellow square—to recalculate the focus, exposure, and white balance.

Here’s when you might want to do this tapping:

• When the whole image looks too dark or too bright. If you tap a dark part of the scene, the photo brightens up; if you tap a bright part, it darkens a bit. You’re telling the camera, “Redo your calculations so this part has the best exposure; I don’t care if the rest of the picture gets brighter or darker.” At that point, you can override the phone’s exposure decision.

  

• When the scene has a color cast. If the photo looks, for example, a little bluish or yellowish, tap a different spot—the one you care most about. The iPhone recomputes its assessment of the white balance.

• When you’re in macro mode. If the foreground object is very close to the lens—4 to 8 inches away—the iPhone automatically goes into macro (super close-up) mode. In this mode, you can do something really cool: You can defocus the background. The background goes soft, slightly blurry, just like the professional photos you see in magazines. No, not as well or as flexibly as in Portrait mode (“Portrait Mode”), but it works on all iPhones.

Adjust Exposure

When you tap the screen to set the focus point, a new control appears: a little yellow sun slider. That’s your exposure control. Slide it up to brighten the whole photo or down to make things darker. Often, just a small adjustment is all it takes to add a splash of light to a dim scene, or to dial the details back into a photo that’s bright white.

To reset the slider to the iPhone’s original proposed setting, tap somewhere else, or just aim the phone at something different for a second.

The point is that the Camera app lets you fuss with the focus point and the exposure level independently.

Focus Lock/Exposure Lock

The iPhone likes to focus and calculate the exposure before it shoots. Cameras are funny that way.

That tendency, however, can get in your way when you’re shooting something that moves fast. Horse races, divers. Pets. Kids on merry-go-rounds, kids on slides, kids eating breakfast. By the time the camera has calculated the focus and exposure, which takes about a second, you’ve lost the shot.

Therefore, Apple provides auto-exposure lock and autofocus lock. They let you set up the focus and exposure in advance, so there’s zero lag when you finally snap the shot.

To use this feature, point the camera at something that has the same distance and lighting as the subject-to-be. For example, focus at the base of the merry-go-round, directly below where your daughter’s horse will appear. Or point at the bottom of the waterslide before your son is ready to go.

Now hold your finger down on that spot on the iPhone’s screen until you see the yellow square blink twice. When you lift your finger, the phrase “AE/AF Lock” tells you that you’ve now locked in exposure and autofocus. (You can tap again to unlock it if you change your mind.)

At this point, you can drag the yellow sun slider to adjust that locked exposure, if you like.

Now you can snap photos, rapid-fire, without ever having to wait while your iPhone rethinks focus and exposure.

The LED Flash

As on most phones, the iPhone’s “flash” is a very bright LED light on the back. You can make it turn on momentarily, providing a small boost of illumination when the lights are low. (That’s a small boost—it won’t do anything for subjects more than a few feet away.)

The iPhone SE, 6, and 6s models, in fact, have two LED flashes: one white, one amber. The 7 and later models take that a step further, with four flashes, together producing 50 percent more light.

The flashes go off simultaneously, with their strengths mixed so that their light matches the color temperature of the scene. (You might notice that the phone flashes once before it captures the shot. That’s the camera’s opportunity to measure the light color of the scene.)

This multi-flash trick makes a huge difference in the quality of your flash photos. Especially in skin tones, which may be why Apple calls the feature “True Tone.” Here’s the before and after:

To adjust the flash’s behavior, tap the in the upper-left corner of the screen. You can choose On (the flash will fire no matter what the lighting conditions), Off (the flash won’t fire), or Auto. That means the flash will turn on automatically when, in the iPhone’s opinion, the scene is too dark. In all cases, you get a warning if the flash will go off for the next shot: a in a yellow box above the preview.

The Screen Flash

The iPhone 6s and later models offer a “flash” on the front, too, for selfies. But it’s not an LED like the one on the back.

Instead, at the moment you take the shot, the screen lights up to illuminate your face. Better yet: It adjusts the color of the screen’s “flash” to give your face the best flesh tones, based on a check of the ambient light color.

Of course, the normal iPhone screen is too tiny to supply much light, even at full brightness. So Apple developed a custom chip with a single purpose: to overclock the screen. In selfie situations, the screen blasts at three times its usual full brightness for a fraction of a second. It is crazy bright.

And it works fantastically well. Here you can see the nuked-looking result from a traditional back LED “flash” (left) side by side with the more nuanced screen flash (right).

Night Mode (iPhone 11 Family)

If you have an iPhone 11, 11 Pro, or 11 Pro Max, you may not need any flash at all. As long as your subject isn’t moving, you’re in for a treat.

When there’s not much light where you are—even when you perceive pitch darkness—these cameras switch automatically into Night mode. A small indicator appears in the top or bottom left corner (facing page, left).

When you take the shot, the iPhone captures many photos over several seconds; cumulatively, the camera soaks up far more faint light than it could with the usual exposure time. The result: absolutely astonishing low-light photos that seem to have been photographed in much brighter light, revealing color and detail not even visible to your eyes (facing page, right).

Professional cameras can do this trick, too, with long exposures—when they’re on tripods. What’s amazing is that the iPhone can do it even when you’re holding the phone in your hand.

Here’s the routine:

1. When the light is low, open the Camera app.

   The icon may be either gray (meaning, “Night mode is available if you tap me, but it’s not absolutely necessary in this light”) or yellow (“You need Night mode in this light”). When it’s yellow, it also shows you how many seconds long the exposure will be.

   

   TIP

   At this point, you can tap the icon to make a time slider appear above the button, shown above at left. It lets you override the iPhone’s time estimate (Auto), so the exposure is longer or shorter. Experiment! (By dragging this slider all the way to 0, you can actually turn Night mode off.)

   If you do, in fact, put the phone on a tripod or otherwise prop it up, the slider offers much longer time options—30 seconds, for example. That’s for you, stargazers.

   Note that Night mode is available only when you’re using the standard lens (iPhone 11 and Pro) and the zoomed-in lens (11 Pro only)—not the ultra-wide lens.

2. Tap the Shutter button ().

   The time slider becomes a countdown. During this time, hold the phone as still as you can.

It’s best to avoid trying Night mode for the first time in a place where sudden vocal outbursts might be undesirable. You’re going to exclaim something the first time you see the results.

Fake Zoom

Every iPhone has a zoom, which can bring you “closer” to the subject. On any iPhone with only one lens on the back, it’s a digital zoom. It doesn’t work like a real camera’s optical zoom, which actually moves lenses to blow up the scene. Instead, it basically just blows up the image, making everything bigger, and slightly degrading the picture quality in the process. Sometimes getting closer to the action is worth the subtle image-quality sacrifice.

To zoom in like this, spread two fingers on the screen. As you spread, a zoom slider appears; you can also drag the handle in the slider, or tap + or −, for more precise zooming.

True Optical Zoom

On the fancier iPhones—iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, XS, 11, and 11 Pro—Apple had enough room to install two lenses, right next to each other. (The 11 Pro has a third lens, described in a moment.)

They include one standard lens (Apple calls it wide-angle) and one telephoto. With one tap on the little 1x button (facing page, left), you can zoom in 2x (middle). This is true optical zoom, not the fake zoom on most previous phones.

2x zoom isn’t a huge amount, but it’s incredibly useful incredibly often.

You can also dial up any amount of zoom between 1x and 2x, again without losing quality. The iPhone performs that stunt by seamlessly combining the zoom lens’s image (in the center of the photo) with a margin provided by the wide lens. Just plant your finger on the 1x and drag it to the left. The circular scale of zooming appears (above, right).

You can even zoom while shooting a video, which is very cool.

You can also keep dragging your finger to the left, past 2x—all the way up to a really blotchy 10x (or 6x for video). Beyond 2x, of course, you’re invoking digital zoom. But sometimes it’s just what you need.

iPhone 11 Family: Wide-Angle Lens

The iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, introduced in 2019, introduce an “ultra-wide angle” lens, great for capturing a big group of people, a tall monument, or a whole building facade at close range.

The iPhone 11 therefore has two lenses on the back: ultra-wide and standard. The iPhone 11 Pro models have three lenses: ultra-wide, standard, and telephoto (zoom), giving you a total zoom range of 4x.

Apple made no attempt to play down the design prominence of these lenses; they stick out, big and black, leading internet wags to mock up future iPhones with squadrons of lenses cluttering up the back like the dots on dice.

To accommodate all this zoominess, Apple had to redesign the Camera mode. On the Pro, you see three buttons: 0.5x (the ultra-wide angle), 1x (standard), and 2x (zoomed in). You can tap these buttons, or you can drag across them to produce a zoom dial (below, right). It lets you dial up any zoom level between 0.5x and 2x—and even higher, all the way to 10x. Once again, though, anything over 2x is a digital zoom that degrades the quality.

You can use these lenses in any of the modes—Video, Time Lapse, and so on—although in Panorama mode, the ultra wide-angle lens distorts the picture quite a bit. Note, too, that the ultra-wide lens isn’t stabilized, like the others, and isn’t as good in low light.

iPhone 11 and 11 Pro: Changing the Proportions

The 11 and 11 Pro Camera app hides the and buttons (Self-Timer and Filter) until you swipe up on the screen (or tap at the top).

That action opens a new row of controls—including one not available on other models: the one directly over the button, usually labeled 4:3.

When you tap it, you’re offered a choice of three aspect ratios, meaning proportions (below, left). 4:3 is the standard iPhone dimensions, the proportions of old TV sets (previous page, top right). 16:9 is a wide rectangle, matching the screen shape of high-def videos (bottom right). And Square is—well, you know.

The “Rule of Thirds” Grid

The rule of thirds, long held as gospel by certain painters and photographers, suggests that you imagine a tic-tac-toe grid superimposed on your frame. As you frame the shot, position the important parts of the photo on those lines or, better yet, at their intersections. Supposedly, this setup creates a stronger composition than putting everything in dead center.

Now, it’s really a consideration of thirds; plenty of photographs are, in fact, strongest when the subject is centered.

But if you want to know where those magic intersections are, duck into Settings → Camera. Turn on Grid. Now the phone displays the tic-tac-toe grid, for your composition pleasure (it’s not part of the photo). You turn it off the same way.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Deep Fusion

In one regard, digital cameras are still pathetic: Compared with the human eye, they have terrible dynamic range.

That’s the range from the brightest to darkest spots in a single scene. If you photograph someone standing in front of a bright window, you’ll just get a black silhouette. The camera doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle both the bright background and the person in front of it.

You could brighten up the exposure so that the person’s face is lit—but then you’d brighten the background to a nuclear-white rectangle.

A partial solution: HDR (high dynamic range) photography. That’s when the camera takes three (or more) photos—at dark, medium, and light exposure settings. Its software combines the best parts of all three, bringing details to both the shadows and the highlights.

Your iPhone has a built-in HDR feature. It’s not as amazing as what an HDR guru can do in Photoshop—for one thing, you have zero control over how the images are combined. But, often, an HDR photo does show more detail in both bright and dark areas than a regular shot would. In the photo below, the sky is blown out in the left image—pure white. On the right, the HDR feature brings back streaks of color.

Out of the box, the iPhone applies HDR automatically when it thinks the lighting is right. If you’d rather have manual control, open Settings → Camera → Smart HDR (or Auto HDR). Now there’s an HDR button right in the Camera app, which you can tap to turn HDR off or on.

And what’s the difference between Smart HDR and Auto HDR? They both work by combining multiple exposures. But Smart HDR also performs dozens of other analysis and adjustment steps in the process. For example, its artificial intelligence has been taught to recognize common elements like faces, hair, beards, and sky. It then examines each of the multiple frames it shot to find the best grab of each of those elements. Smart HDR might light a face more evenly, sharpen the hair, and remove noise (grain) from the sky—all in a fraction of a second.

Furthermore, on these models, Smart HDR affects types of shots that regular HDR does not, like panoramas, shots in dim light, and action photos. Welcome to the world of computational photography.

On iPhone 11 and 11 Pro models, Apple takes this basic concept and runs a marathon with it. These cameras take nine shots every time you tap the button, analyze all 24 million captured pixels, and assemble the finished photo from only the finest, clearest, and best-focused among them. The process is called Deep Fusion, and it’s responsible for some of the most impressive phone photography yet.

There’s no Deep Fusion on/off switch; it happens automatically every time the phone thinks you need it. It works only on the standard and telephoto lens, not the ultra-wide angle one, and requires that Settings → Camera → Capture Outside of Frame be turned off.

Filters

The success of Instagram made it clear to Apple that the masses want filters, special effects that tweak the color of your photo in artsy ways. You, too, can make your pictures look old, washed-out, or oversaturated. In fact, you have nine options at your disposal.

• Filter before you shoot. Tap to view your options (below, left). You see a scrolling strip of color and black-and-white filters. The first one always represents “no filter.”

  NOTE

  On the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, swipe up on the screen to reveal the filters button.

  

  Tap a filter thumbnail to try it. Each turns your photo into a variation of black-and-white or plays with its saturation (color intensity), as shown on the facing page at right. When you’ve decided what you want, take the shot as usual. (To turn off the filters, tap again, and then select the Original tile.)

• Filter after you shoot. You can also apply a filter to any photo you’ve already taken; see “Filters ()”.

Taking the Shot

All right. You’ve opened the Camera app. You’ve set up the focus, exposure, flash, grid, HDR, and zoom. If, in fact, your subject hasn’t already left the scene, you can now take the picture. You do that in any of four ways:

• Tap .

• Press either of the physical volume buttons on the left edge of the phone.

  This option is fantastic. If you hold the phone with the volume buttons at the top, they’re right where the shutter would be on a real camera. Pressing one feels more natural than—and doesn’t shake the camera as much as—tapping the screen.

• Press a volume button on your earbuds clicker—a great way to trigger the shutter without jiggling the phone at all, and a more convenient way to take selfies when the phone is at arm’s length.

• Say “Hey Siri, say cheese.” Yes, you can snap a shot by voice control—if you’ve set up the “Say Cheese” shortcut (“Built-In Shortcuts”). With this trick, you can set the phone down 5 feet away and take a photo of yourself with only your voice as the shutter button.

Either way, if the phone isn’t muted, you hear the snap! sound of a picture successfully taken.

You get to admire your work for only about half a second—and then the photo slurps itself into the thumbnail icon at the lower-left corner of the screen. To review the photo you just took, tap that icon.

At this point, you can look at other pictures you’ve taken (if the phone is unlocked) by tapping the screen and then All Photos.

This is your opportunity to choose a photo (or many) for emailing, texting, posting to Facebook, and so on; tap Select, tap the photos you want, and then tap the Share button (). See “The Share Sheet”.

Burst Mode

The iPhone can snap many photos in a burst—10 shots a second—which is great when you’re trying to capture a moment that will be over in a blink: a golf swing, a pet trick, a toddler sitting still.

• iPhone 11 family. Drag the button to the left and hold it there. (You can no longer shoot a burst by holding down a volume key.)

• Older models. Hold down the button or a volume key.

As you hold down your finger, a counter rapidly ticks off how many shots you’ve fired.

Better yet, the phone helps you clean up the mess afterward—the hassle of inspecting all 130 photos you shot, to find the ones worth keeping.

Tap the lower-left thumbnail. To keep you sane, the iPhone depicts your burst as a single photo, with the phrase “Burst (72 photos)” (or whatever) in the corner of the screen. (Its thumbnail bears multiple frames, as though it were a stack of slides.)

Here’s where it gets cool. If you tap Select, you see all frames of the burst in a horizontally scrolling row. Underneath, you see an even smaller “filmstrip” of them—and a few are marked with dots.

These are the ones the iPhone has decided are the keepers. It does that by studying the clarity or blur of each shot, examining how much one frame is different from those around it, and even skipping past shots where somebody’s eyes are closed. Tap the marked thumbnails to see if you approve of the iPhone’s selections.

Whether you do or not, you should work through the larger thumbnails in the burst, tapping each one you want to keep. (The circle in the corner sprouts a blue checkmark.)

When you tap Done, the phone asks: “Would you like to keep the other photos in this burst?” Tap Keep Everything to preserve all the shots in the burst, so you can return later to extract a different set of frames; tap Keep Only 2 Favorites (or whatever number you checked off) to discard the ones you skipped.

Self-Portraits (the Front Camera)

The iPhone has a second camera on the front, above the screen. It lets you use the screen itself as a viewfinder to frame yourself, experiment with your expression, and check your teeth.

To activate the front camera, tap the or . Suddenly, you see yourself on the screen. Frame the shot, and then tap to take the photo.

Now, the front camera is not the back camera. Unless you’re using one of the new iPhone 11 family phones, its resolution, light sensitivity, and focusing ability aren’t as good.

But when your goal is a well-framed selfie that you’ll use on the screen—email or the web, for example, where resolution isn’t very important—then having the front-camera option is better than not having it.

The Self-Timer

A self-timer is essential when you want to be in the picture yourself; you can prop the phone on something and then run into the scene. It’s also a great way to prevent camera shake (which produces blurry photos), because your finger doesn’t touch the phone. Just tap the , and then 3s (a 3-second countdown) or 10s (10 seconds).

Now, when you tap or press a volume key, you get a countdown: huge digits on the screen if you’re using the front camera, a blinking flash if you’re using the rear camera. After the countdown, the phone takes the picture all by itself. (If the sound is on, you’ll hear the shutter noise.)

Correction: In its regular, non-Live modes, the phone takes 10 pictures, in burst mode. The phone assumes that if you’re using the self-timer, then you won’t be able to see when everybody’s eyes are open. So it takes 10 shots in a row; you can weed through them later to find the best one.

Reviewing Live Photos

As you flick through the photos in the Photos app, you’ll know when a photo is a Live Photo; you’ll see it animate for a half-second.

To play the full three-second video with sound, long-press it.

Editing Live Photos

You can edit Live Photos in all kinds of interesting ways; see “Marking Up Your Photos”.

Sharing Live Photos

What happens if you try to send a Live Photo to some other device? Well, first of all, you’ll know you’re about to share a Live Photo. After you tap , a special icon reminds you. You can tap to turn off that logo before you send, so you’re sharing only the still photo.

If you proceed with Live Photos turned on, what happens next depends on what kind of device receives it.

If it’s running recent Apple software (iOS 9 or later, OS X El Capitan or later), the Live Photo plays on that gadget, too. On the Mac, in Photos, click Live Photo to play it. On an iPad or older iPhone, long-press to play it back.

What if it’s a device or software program that doesn’t know about Live Photos—if you send it as a text message, for example, or open it in Photoshop? Behind the scenes, a Live Photo has two elements: a 12-megapixel JPEG still image and a three-second QuickTime movie. In these situations, only the JPEG image arrives at the other end.

Adjusting the Blur

On the iPhone XS, XS Max, and 11 family, you can dial in how much blur you get, either before or after taking the shot. This feature is super-useful, especially when the phone’s instinct is to blur out a detail you’d rather remain sharp (like a companion in your group).

To view the Depth (blur) slider before you take the shot, tap in the corner. To adjust the blur later, in Photos, tap Edit, and then tap f4.5 (or whatever the number is) in the corner of the screen.

Neither adjustment is permanent; you can increase or decrease the blur months or years later, without ever affecting the quality of the photo. (You can edit the blur on the Mac, too.)

Studio Lighting

On the iPhone 8 Plus and Face ID models, a further refinement to Portrait mode awaits, something Apple calls studio lighting. It’s a set of five lighting effects that scroll by as though on a disc. Natural Light is the original shot. Studio Light brightens your subjects as though they were lit from the front with pro studio lighting (facing page, top). Contour Light deepens shadows.

Stage Light, incredibly, cuts out the background, making it black (facing page, bottom left). Stage Light Mono does the same, but in black-and-white. And High-Key Light Mono, new in iOS 13, is black-and-white with a white background (bottom right).

In iOS 13, for the first time, you’re allowed to adjust how much of those lighting modes you’re applying. After choosing the effect you want to apply, just drag the Amount-O-Meter, the little ruler by the studio-lighting icons.

You can try these lighting modes out either before you snap or after (in Photos, when you tap Edit).

iPhone 11 Family: QuickTake Video

If you have an iPhone 11 or 11 Pro, a special treat awaits, which Apple calls QuickTake: You can now shoot videos even in Photo mode! No mode-switching necessary, which can be a time-saving, fumble-reducing blessing.

Instead, just hold down the regular shutter button (), or single-press either volume key on the side of the phone. You’re recording video as long as you’re pressing. (A new button appears, too, in case you want to snap a still photo while you’re rolling.)

Love that tip? Then here’s something even tippier: If your finger gets tired holding down the button while recording, slide it to the right and then let go. You’ve just triggered Record Lock (below). Now you’ll keep on filming until you tap to stop.

A Note About Resolution—and 4K Video

Video generally plays back at 30 frames a second. But the iPhone 6 and later can record and play back 60 frames a second. Video you shoot this way has a smoothness and clarity that’s almost surreal. (It also takes up twice as much space on your phone.) You choose the video quality you want in Settings → Camera → Record Video. Experiment with 60 frames per second; see if you feel the result is worth the storage space.

This is also, by the way, where you turn on 4K recording on the 6s and later models. 4K televisions, also called Ultra HD, are TV sets with four times as many tiny pixels as an HDTV, for four times the clarity.

4K shooting is not the factory setting, and that’s a good thing; it takes up a huge amount of storage space (375 megabytes a minute). Furthermore, you probably don’t have anywhere to play back recorded 4K video! Paradoxically, no iPhone has enough pixels to play 4K video. To see the difference, you need a 4K television or 4K computer screen, and you still have to sit very close. (You can post 4K video to YouTube—but even then, few people have screens capable of playing it back in 4K.)

Things to Do While You’re Rolling

Once you’ve begun capturing video, don’t think your work is done. You can have all kinds of fun during the recording. For example:

• Change focus. You can change focus while you’re filming, which is great when you’re panning from a nearby object to a distant one. Refocusing is automatic. But you can also force a refocusing (for example, when the phone is focusing on the wrong thing) by tapping to specify a new focus point. The iPhone recalculates the focus, white balance, and exposure at the point where you tapped, just as it does when you’re taking stills.

• Change exposure. While you’re recording, you can drag your finger up or down to make the scene brighter or dimmer.

• Zoom in. You can zoom in or out while you’re rolling. Just spread or pinch two fingers on the screen, like you would to magnify a photo. Pinch two fingers to zoom out again. (This option is not available if you’re shooting in 4K mode at 60 frames a second, however.)

  On two- or three-lens phones, you can either do that two-finger spreading or drag across the zoom buttons (0.5, 1x, 2x), as described in “iPhone 11 and 11 Pro: Changing the Proportions”. Or tap the zoom buttons to jump between zoom levels while you’re recording. On the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, the phone adds a graceful animated zoom effect when you do that, so that the jump isn’t quite so sudden.

  TIP

  On single-lens phones, once you start to zoom, a zoom slider appears on the screen. It’s much easier to zoom smoothly by dragging its handle than it is to use a two-finger pinch or spread.

  So here’s a smart idea: Zoom in slightly before you start recording, so the zoom slider appears on the screen. Then, during the shot, drag its handle to zoom in, as smoothly as you like.

• Take a still photo. Yes, you can snap still photos while you’re capturing video. Just tap the that appears while you’re filming. Awesome.

When you’re finished recording, tap . The iPhone stops recording and plays a chime; it’s ready to record another shot.

There’s no easier-to-use camcorder on earth. And what a lot of capacity! Each individual shot can be an hour long—and on the 512-gigabyte iPhones, you can record 272 hours of video. Enough to capture the entire elementary-school talent show.

The Front Camera

You can film yourself, too. Just tap or before you film to make the iPhone use its front-mounted camera. The resolution isn’t as high as what the back camera captures—except on the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro—but it’s still high definition.

The Video Light

You know the LED “flash” on the back of the phone? You can use it as a video light, too, supplying some illumination to subjects within about 5 feet or so. Just tap the and then tap On before you start recording. (Alas, you have to turn the light on before you start rolling. You can’t turn it on or off in the middle of a shot.)

The Photos Tab

On the Photos tab, iOS groups your photos intelligently into sets that are easy to navigate.

The Years, Months, and Days views are extraordinary displays. Each presents representative photos chosen by artificial intelligence. These displays aren’t cluttered up by screenshots, receipts, or duplicate photos, and the AI crops each thumbnail to show only the important part of the photo it represents.

You can switch among the views by tapping the buttons at the bottom of the Photos tab, of course. But it’s much more fun to pinch or zoom with two fingers to move from Years to Months to Days—or the other direction.

What’s cool is that as you zoom into finer time increments, you remain on the same key photo. For example, if a photo of you doing a belly flop is the sample photo for 2019, zooming into Months reveals the same photo in the context of July of that year, and zooming into Days reveals the same photo on July 15. (If you zoom in still more, you actually open that photo and start enlarging it.)

• Years view presents one handsome photo for each year (facing page, left); it starts out showing you a photo from this time of year each year. Scrolling through them is like a photographic time machine.

  

• Month view (above, middle) isn’t one photo per month. There are month headings, but the photo thumbnails are grouped by Moments—that is, taken in one place at one time (all the shots at the picnic by the lake one weekend, for example). The phone even uses its GPS to give each cluster a name: “San Francisco, California (Union Square),” for example.

• Days view is a grid of beautiful photos (above, right). You can, of course, tap one of the pictures or videos to open it full-screen, but the photo grid is almost as good as a slideshow right there.

  NOTE

  As you scroll through these displays, videos and Live Photos play silently in place. It’s a lovely effect.

• All Photos (next page, left) carries over from previous iOS versions. It’s a massive, chronological, endlessly scrolling sheet of tiny photo thumbnails.

  Long-press any image within the batch to see a larger version of it, complete with Copy, Share, Favorite, and Delete buttons.

The “For You” Tab

The more Apple invests in machine learning (a form of AI), the better Photos gets at figuring out which are your best shots and how to present them to you!

This tab offers groupings like this:

• Shared Album Activity. Here are the latest photos in your Shared albums (“Sharing Suggestions”).

• Recently Shared are photos and videos you’ve sent to somebody (or somebodies) as Messages.

• Memories. What Apple calls Memories are automatically selected groups of pix and videos from certain time periods or trips, which, with a tap, become gorgeous, musical slideshows (below, right). Most people are pleasantly surprised at how coherent and well-created these are, even though they’re totally automated. Photos, short pieces of your videos, and even scrolling panoramas are all first-class citizens in these slideshows.

  Right off the bat, you see a few of Photos’ suggestions, represented as labeled billboards (“Cape Cod Summer,” “Best of Last Week,” “Casey and Me”). Tap to open a Memory. Tap to start an instant slideshow, with music, with photos changing to the beat. They’re usually fantastic.

  During the slideshow, you can tap for some quick editing options (below, left). You can change the animation/music style (Dreamy, Sentimental, Gentle, Chill, and so on) or the slideshow length (Short, Medium, Long).

  

  For more detailed editing at this point, tap Edit. Now you can edit the Memory’s Title (name), Title Image (the main photo representing this Memory), Photos & Videos (tap to add one, to delete one), Music (either the app’s selections or anything from your music library), or Duration (dial up any length you want).

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  When you tap +, the Select Photos screen shows all candidate shots; checkmarks appear on the ones Photos has chosen to include. Now you can adjust which shots appear in the Memory—and also admire how clever Photos has been in the first place.

  When playback (and editing) are all over, you can scroll down to see the photos, people, and places that make up this Memory.

  At the very top, the button offers options like Share Photos (uses the same sharing mechanism described in “The Share Sheet”—even suggests, as shares, people it recognizes in the photos); Delete Memory; and Add to Favorite Memories (adds this slideshow to a new folder on the Albums tab called Favorite Memories, for quick access later).

  Once you’ve got a killer Memory on your hands, don’t miss the option to send it to other people as a video. While a Memory slideshow is playing, tap it to reveal the button at the bottom.

• Featured Photos. Apple is coy about which photos show up in this row, other than to say its AI considers them your “best photos.” They’re usually in focus and well-lit, and occasionally you’ll see one that was taken “On This Day” in an earlier year. Think of it as Photos’ version of the Facebook feature that digs up old photos it thinks you might like to be reminded of.

• Effects Suggestions are photos that Photos, in all its modesty, thinks could be improved with one of its effects. If you take a lot of Live Photos (“Live Photos”), that may mean applying something like Loop, Bounce, or Long Exposure—see “Marking Up Your Photos”. If you’ve taken some Portrait-mode shots, you may see a proposal to add one of the studio-lighting effects (“Studio Lighting”).

• Sharing Suggestions are pictures that were all taken at the same time and place. Photos does its best to recognize who’s in the pictures—and to propose sharing with those people. Details in “Sharing Suggestions”.

The Albums Tab

The third tab of your Photos app, Albums, presents another set of roads into your photo collection. Each category presents a few example albums to get you started—and then offers a See All button to expand that category.

The primary headings are these:

• My Albums. Here you get a list of albums you’ve created (or copied to the phone from your Mac or PC). The first one is always Recents—everything on your phone, including videos.

  Favorites is here, too. This folder gives you quick access to your favorite photos. And how does the phone know which photos are your favorites? Easy: You’ve told it. You’ve tapped the icon under a photo, anywhere within the Photos app.

• Shared Albums lists the most recent clusters of pictures you’ve electronically shared with other people—or that they’ve shared with you, as described in “Sharing Suggestions”. Each thumbnail shows tiny headshots of the people you’ve sent them to.

• People & Places. Impressively enough, Photos can auto-group your photos according to which people are in them (using facial recognition) and the places where you shot them (using GPS). You get one icon here for People, and one for Places.

  People: Once you’ve given the software a running start, it can find those people in the rest of your photo collection automatically. That’s handy every now and then—when you need several photos of your kid for a school project, for example.

  

  On the People screen, you get thumbnails representing the faces Photos has found and grouped, complete with a tally of how many photos it’s found. At the top, you see people you’ve designated as favorites (previous page, left).

  Tap a thumbnail to see all the photos of this person (previous page, right). If you see “There are additional photos for review” at the top, tap Review; Photos shows you other photos it thinks are the same person. Select the ones it got right, and then hit Done; hit Add Name to name the person (if you haven’t already), so Photos will more correctly identify her from now on.

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  If Photos has created two “people” icons for the same person, here’s how to fix it: Tap one of her thumbnails to open it; tap Select; tap each duplicate, and then hit Merge.

  If there’s a photographed person in your life whom Photos doesn’t offer on the People screen, by all means add that person yourself. Open the photo, swipe up to see a tiny round headshot of each person in it, tap a person, tap Add Name, enter the name, tap Next, and then tap Done.

  And if there’s someone Photos is misidentifying—an Aunt Gertie wound up as an Uncle Eugene—you can fix her, although you’ll have to tap this sequence very carefully:

  In the People album, tap the Uncle Eugene thumbnail. Tap Show More → Select → Show Faces and select each misidentified face. Then tap to open the Share sheet, and finally tap Not This Person.

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  That weird Share-sheet method is also how you choose a different key photo—the one headshot that represents this person on the main People screen. In the People album, tap the person’s tile, and then tap Select. Tap the preferred photo, tap to open the Share sheet, and then finally tap Make Key Photo.

  Places: Every photo you take with a smartphone (and a few very fancy cameras) gets geotagged—stamped, behind the scenes, with its geographic coordinates. When you tap Places, you see a map, dotted with clusters of photos you took in each place. Tap one to see the photos you took there.

• Media Types. As a convenience to you, these categories give you one-tap shopping for everything you’ve captured using the Camera app’s specialized picture and video modes: Videos, Selfies, Live Photos, Portrait (if you have a Plus or Face ID phone), Long Exposure, Panoramas, Time-Lapse, Slo-Mo, Bursts, Screenshots, Screen Recordings, and Animated. (Long Exposure and Animated are Live Photos to which you’ve applied the effects described in “Handing Off to Other Editing Apps”.)

  Super-handy when you’re trying to show someone your latest time-lapse masterpiece, for example; now you know where to look for it.

• Imports. This “album” is incredibly useful, if you can remember it exists. It lists all the photos you’ve taken with other cameras—actual cameras, drones, GoPros, and so on—that you imported into the iPhone, a Mac, or any other Apple gadget associated with your iCloud account.

• Hidden. Here are photos you’ve hidden, as described in “Hide a Photo”.

• Recently Deleted. Even after you think you’ve deleted a photo or video from your phone, you have 30 days to change your mind. Deleted pictures and videos sit in this folder, quietly counting down to their own doomsdays.

  If you wind up changing your mind, you can open Recently Deleted, tap the photo you’d condemned, and tap Recover. It pops back into its rightful place in the Photos app, saved from termination.

  On the other hand, you can also zap a photo into oblivion immediately. Tap to open one of your recently deleted photos, tap Delete, and then confirm with Delete Photo. If you tap Select, you can also hit Delete All or Recover All.

As you’d guess, you can drill down from any of these groupings to a screen full of thumbnails, and from there to an individual photo.

You can manually add selected photos into new albums—a great way to organize a huge batch you’ve shot on vacation.

To do that, open a set of photos (for example, your All Photos album). Tap Select; and then tap (or drag through) all the photos you want to move to a new or different album. Tap to open the Share sheet; scroll down, and hit Add to Album. From here, you can either choose an existing album or hit New Album.

To delete an album you created on the phone, start on the main Albums tab. Tap See All, and then Edit, and then tap the button on the album you want to delete.

The Search Tab

A search tab in Photos might seem odd. How can you search for a blob of pixels? How does the phone know what’s in a picture?

Artificial intelligence, people. Apple has given Photos the ability to recognize what’s in your pictures and videos. You can search for “dog,” or “beach,” or whatever. You can search by who’s in the pictures, what the event was (concerts, festivals), by month or season or year, by business or museum, and so on. Or combine all of those into one search.

When you tap , the phone offers some one-tap canned searches based on dates (like One Year Ago and Trips), people’s faces, locations (like Massachusetts and San Francisco Airport), and categories (like Animals, Sports, and Performances). Tap to see the photos and videos that match.

To search for something more specific, you can type things like these:

• Place or event names. Tucson, bay area, detroit, daleford road, sundance film festival, superbowl, home, lincoln high school, museum…

• Times. Last year, 2018, summer, night, morning, last week, march 2016, yesterday…

• People. Casey, dad, me, sherwood atkinson…

• Captions or album names. Chess club, corp offsite, robin’s first jalapeño, mom bday…

• Nouns. Forest, girl, plane, piano, fence, field, food truck, restaurant, party, citrus fruit, storefront, pizza, graffiti, money, mountain, cats, skiing, hat, dancing, music…

As you type, Photos builds a list of search terms it thinks you might intend. (If you’ve typed Fi, it might list Fish, Fish Tank, Fig Tree, and so on.) Each shows how many pictures match that term.

Tap one of these autocomplete terms to see all the matching photos. (The best matches appear in clusters: photo thumbnails, Moments, Albums, Dates, Memories. To see all the matching photos, tap See All.)

You can also combine search terms. The instant you tap one of the search results, you’re offered two ways to refine your search:

• The search-results list changes to reveal subcategories. If you just searched for 2015, for example, the options may now include Fall, Winter, United States, Sports, and Mom—all from 2015.

• The result you tapped becomes a token in the search box—a blue rectangle with an icon, as shown below.

  In this example, if you tap Musical Instruments in the first results list, that term becomes a token (middle).

  The results list now offers subcategories within that token. In the example, suppose you tap Jeffrey as the person (middle). Now Jeffrey becomes a token.

  

  By the time you’re finished, the tokens might include Musical Instruments Jeffrey Summer—the perfect way to pull up that hilarious picture you remember taken of your nephew struggling to carry a string bass that one July.

Apple’s image recognition software is pretty amazing. It makes occasional mistakes—you may find a truck in your Cars category or something—but in general, it’s an amazing way to find a pixel in a haystack.

Flicking, Rotating, Zooming, Panning

Once a photo is open at full size, you have your chance to perform the four most famous and dazzling tricks of the iPhone: flicking, rotating, zooming, and panning a photo.

• Flicking horizontally is how you move to the next/previous photo or movie. As you flip through your collection in iOS 13, videos start playing automatically—but silently. If you tap , the audio plays, too, even if your silencer switch is on. (If you prefer the old way, where videos didn’t play automatically at all—and played with sound when they did—turn off Settings→Photos→Autoplay Videos and Live Photos.)

• Zooming a photo means magnifying it. Double-tapping it is one way, but the two-finger spread gives you more control over what gets magnified and by how much. Once you’ve spread a photo bigger, you can then pinch to scale it down again. Or just double-tap to restore the original size. (You don’t have to restore a photo to original size before advancing to the next one, though; if you flick enough times, you’ll pull the next photo onto the screen.)

• Panning is moving a photo around on the screen after you’ve zoomed in. Just drag your finger; no scroll bars are necessary.

• Rotating is what you do when a horizontal photo or video appears on the upright iPhone, which makes the photo look small and fills most of the screen with blackness.

  Just turn the iPhone 90 degrees in either direction. The photo rotates and enlarges to fill its new, wider canvas. (This doesn’t work when the phone is flat on its back—on a table, for example. It has to be more or less upright. It also doesn’t work when portrait orientation is locked.)

  When the iPhone is rotated, all the controls and gestures reorient themselves. For example, flicking right to left still brings on the next photo, even if you’re now holding the iPhone the wide way.

Hide a Photo

Here’s a quirky little feature: It’s possible to hide a photo from the Photos tab so it appears only in a special Hidden folder.

Apple noticed that lots of people use their phones to take screenshots of apps, pictures of whiteboards, shots of package labels or parking-garage signs, and so on. These images aren’t scenic or lovely; they’re not memories; you don’t want a slideshow of them; and they don’t look good when they appear nestled in with your shots-to-remember.

Open the photo and then tap ; in the Sharing options that appear, tap Hide. To confirm, tap Hide Photo.

Whatever photos you hide go to the Hidden folder on the Albums tab, so you can find them easily. From here, you can unhide a shot the same way: Hit and then Unhide.

Deleting Photos

If some photo no longer meets your exacting standards, you can delete it. Open the photo; tap . When you tap Delete Photo, that picture is gone. Or, rather, it’s moved to the Recently Deleted folder described in “The Search Tab”; you have 30 days to change your mind.

The exception: If you use iCloud Photos (“iCloud Photos”), you’re warned that you’re about to delete the photo from all your devices—and that’s what happens.

Photo Controls

When you first open a photo, some useful controls appear, in blue against the white background (next page). They show up either at the top or bottom of the screen, depending on how you’re holding the phone. (Tap the photo to hide them and summon a black background, for a more impressive photo presentation.)

• Where and When. The top of the screen shows where and when this photo was taken (“Dallas, September 13,” for example).

• Edit is the gateway to the iPhone’s photo-editing features, described starting in “The New Photo Editor”.

• Favorite (). When you find a picture you love—enough that you might want to call it up later to show people—tap . This photo or video now appears in the Favorites folder (in the Albums tab of the Photos app), so it’s easy to find with your other prize-winners.

  

• Share () opens the Share sheet, described starting in “Step 1: Choose the Photos”. This is where you can do something with this photo besides just staring at it. You can use it as your iPhone’s wallpaper, print it, copy it, text it, send it by email, use it as somebody’s headshot in your Contacts list, post it on Twitter or Facebook, and so on.

• Delete ( ). Gets rid of this photo, as described already.

• Related photos. There’s one more element of the photo screen that you might miss. To see it, drag upward. You may see a map of where it was taken (and the address) or the headshots of people Photos has recognized.

Adjust Color ()

Just beneath or beside the photo, a scrolling line of 16 circular buttons awaits. These are the adjustment buttons. They control Exposure, Contrast, and so on.

For each picture adjustment, you can dial in how much of each effect (Exposure, Contrast, and so on) you want to apply. For your convenience, you feel a little click when you return to the original zero-adjustment point.

As you drag this intensity ruler, you can see its effect on the photo. As you drag, for your reference, two other wonderful things happen: The adjustment button itself sprouts a yellow intensity ring that grows as you approach 100 percent, and a number inside the button shows the exact amount you’ve applied (on a scale up to 100).

Now that you have the lay of the land, here’s a tour of the 17 controls.

• Auto-Enhance (). When you tap this magical button, Photos analyzes the relative brightness of all the pixels in your photo and attempts to “balance” it. After a moment, the app adjusts the brightness and contrast and intensifies dull or grayish-looking areas. Usually, the pictures look richer and more vivid as a result.

  You may find that Auto-Enhance has little effect on some photos, only minimally improves others, and totally rescues a few. In any case, if you don’t care for the result, you can drag the intensity ruler to dial back the effect, or tap the button again to turn Auto-Enhance off.

• Exposure adjusts the brightness of all pixels.

• Brilliance brightens dark areas and dials back the brightest spots to reveal hidden detail.

• Highlights recovers lost details out of very bright areas.

• Shadows pulls lost details out of very dark areas.

  

• Contrast deepens the most saturated colors.

• Brightness is like Exposure, but it doesn’t brighten parts that are already bright.

• Black Point determines what is “black,” shifting the entire dark/light range upward or downward.

• Saturation affects the intensity of the colors—from vivid fake-looking Disney all the way down to black and white. Often, just a nudge can liven a dull photo or make blue skies “pop” a little more.

• Vibrance, new in iOS 13, intensifies colors, much like Saturation—but without altering skin tones.

• Warmth adjusts the color tint of the photo, making it warmer or cooler overall by shifting all colors along the yellow-to-blue spectrum.

• Tint is similar to Warmth but affects colors on the green-to-magenta spectrum.

• Sharpness, new in iOS 13, applies a subtle crispness to the photo by emphasizing the brightness differential of adjacent color areas.

• Definition (also new) adds clarity by adjusting the contrast of the photo’s midtones.

• Noise Reduction attempts to remove the tiny colored speckles (digital “noise”) that sometimes appear in low-light photos, making them look grainy.

• Vignette is new in iOS 13. It darkens or brightens the four corners of the photo. When applied subtly, the result draws the viewer’s eyes to the center of the picture; when applied heavily, the whole thing looks like an 1850s daguerreotype image.

• Remove Red Eye (). This button appears at the top of the editing screen only if Photos does, in fact, find red-eye—devilish, glowing-red pupils—in your subjects’ eyes.

  Red-eye is caused when the light of your flash illuminates the blood-red retinal tissue at the back of the eyes. That’s why red-eye problems are worse when you shoot pictures in a dim room: Your subjects’ pupils are dilated, allowing even more light from your flash to reach their retinas.

  When you tap this button, a message says, “Tap each red-eye.” Do what it says: Tap with your finger inside each eye that has the problem. A little white ring appears around the pupil, and the app turns the red in each eye to black.

At any point, you can tap Cancel to abandon your editing altogether, or Done to save the edited photo and close the editing controls.

Filters ()

Filters are effects that make a photo black and white, oversaturated, or washed out. You can apply a filter either as you take the picture (“Filters”) or afterward.

Tap to view a scrolling row of filter buttons. Tap each to see what it looks like on your photo. As with picture adjustments, you can then dial back the intensity of the filter by dragging the effects ruler. And you can temporarily remove the filter (to compare with the original photo) by tapping the photo itself.

(Don’t these filters more or less duplicate the effects of the color adjustments described already? Yes. But filters produce canned, instant changes that don’t require as much tweaking.)

Crop/Straighten ()

This button opens a crazy editing screen where you can adjust the proportions, angle, or perspective of the photo, and even make a mirror image of it.

Here’s the fun you can have in this mode:

• Auto. When you first tap , iOS analyzes whatever horizontal lines it finds in the photo—the horizon, for example—and uses them as a guide to straightening the photo automatically. You see the whole thing rotate, tilting and enlarging slightly to fill the frame without leaving gaps at the corners.

  You can reject the iPhone’s proposal (tap Auto to turn it off). Or you can tilt the photo more or less (drag your finger across the ruler scale).

• Flip Horizontal (). Creates a mirror image of the photo or video—something you’ve never been able to do before in the Photos app. The effect is shown on the facing page at right.

• Rotate (). Tap as many times as necessary to turn the picture 90 degrees or even upside-down.

• Straighten (). This slider lets you tilt the photo manually, to compensate for bad framing when you took the shot.

• Vertical, Horizontal Perspective (). As a little gift to you in iOS 13, Apple has now given you perspective-correction tools. Drag the slider to “tip” the photo in space, either vertically or horizontally, as though you’re changing your viewing angle. Below at right, the lower edge is being expanded to emphasize the dog’s size.

• Constrain Cropping (). The other work you can do in this mode is cropping (below, left).

  Cropping means shaving off unnecessary portions of a photo. Usually, you crop a photo to improve its composition—adjusting where the subject appears within the frame of the picture. Often, a photo has more impact if it’s cropped tightly around the subject, especially in portraits. Or maybe you want to crop out wasted space, like big expanses of background sky. If necessary, you can even chop a former romantic interest out of an otherwise perfect family portrait.

  

  To crop a photo you’ve opened, drag inward on any edge of the white border. The part of the photo the iPhone will eventually trim away is dimmed. You can recenter the photo within your cropping frame by dragging any part of the photo, inside or outside the white box. Adjust and drag until everything looks just right.

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  Remember the Capture Outside the Frame option described in “iPhone 11 and 11 Pro: Changing the Proportions” (iPhone 11 and 11 Pro)? This is the big payoff.

  A tiny symbol on an open photo or video indicates that it was captured with that extra margin of image. Tap Edit, then tap . Now you can not only crop into the photo or video—you can crop outward, bringing previously hidden portions into view.

  If you’ve turned on Settings→Camera→Apply Auto Adjustments, the app may use that extra image area automatically, for the purposes of straightening the photo or video and improving its composition. If you’re not a fan of its work, tap to turn it off.

  Ordinarily, you can create a cropping rectangle of any proportions, freehand. But if you tap , you get a choice of nine canned proportions: Original, Freeform, Square, 16:9, 7: 5, 4:3, and so on. They force the cropping frame to preset proportions as you drag.

  NOTE

  The Original option here maintains the proportions of the original photo even as you make the grid smaller.

  This aspect-ratio feature is important if you plan to order prints of your photos at standard photo sizes: 4 × 6, 5 × 7, 8 × 10, and so on. (The iPhone’s standard photos are 4 × 3, which doesn’t divide evenly into most of those standard print sizes.)

  When you tap one of the preset sizes, the cropping frame stays in those proportions as you drag its edges.

Marking Up Your Photos

Here’s a feature nobody saw coming: You can draw or type on your photos, right from within the Photos app. Once you’re in editing mode, tap and then Markup. iOS 13 presents its new, improved standard drawing kit, which is described in “Add a Sketch”.

Editing Live Photos

When you tap Edit on a Live Photo, you get a bonus button at the bottom that looks like this: .

When you tap it, you get a button, which lets you turn off the sound; a button, which eliminates the three-second video and creates a plain old photo; and a sort of filmstrip along the bottom. You can use it for two things:

• Drag the and markers (currently at the outer ends of the little filmstrip) inward, exactly as shown in “Time-Lapse Mode”. You’re trimming the Live Photo so that it’s shorter.

• Tap a different “frame” of the filmstrip, and then tap Make Key Photo, to designate that frame as the new face of this Live Photo—the one that shows up as its thumbnail in, for example, the Photos app.

But there’s even more fun to be had with Live Photos—and not in the Edit mode, either. (Hit Done or Cancel to get out of there, if necessary.)

On the Live Photo’s normal viewing page, the one with the and Edit buttons, you can swipe upward to reveal a choice of four special video-playback effects, which used to require separate apps to achieve:

• Live. That’s the normal Live Photo as you know it.

• Loop makes the three-second video play over and over again, with a crossfade to conceal the seam. Great for funny expressions, cat yawns, pratfalls.

• Bounce plays start → finish → start → finish, and so on, playing forward and then backward. Use it on a Live Photo of a kid doing a cannonball into a pool. Pure comedy.

  

• Long Exposure simulates the effect of leaving the camera on a tripod with the lens open for a long time. In “real” photography, the result might produce the milky, softly blurred surface of a babbling brook, or cool-looking red streaks of taillights.

  Realistically, this effect works only on scenes where the background doesn’t move, but the subject does. Classic examples include moving water, moving traffic, and moving people—in crowds or on teams.

  Unlike the other effects, the result of this one is a still image; the effect more or less superimposes all the frames in the Live Photo. (The video element is still there, looking like a standard Live Photo—long-press the screen to see it.) But the goal here is to export the finished still image. Every now and then, the result is surprising and delightful.

Handing Off to Other Editing Apps

OK, Apple: Who are you, and what have you done with the company that used to believe in closed systems?

Camera+, Fragment, and other photo apps now work so well with the Photos app that it can seem as though their tools are built right into it.

Here’s the drill: Open a photo in Photos. Tap Edit. Tap . Now you see the icons of all apps on your phone that have been updated to work with this feature, which Apple calls Extensibility.

The photo opens immediately in the app you choose, with all its editing features available. You can freely bounce back and forth between Apple’s editor and its competitors’.

Saving Your Changes

Once you’ve rotated, cropped, auto-enhanced, or color-tweaked a photo, tap Done. You’ve just made your changes permanent.

Or, rather, temporarily permanent. Remember: You can return to an edited photo at any time to undo the changes you’ve made (tap Revert). When you send the photo off the phone (by email, to your computer, whatever), that copy freezes the edits in place—but the copy on your phone is still revertable.

iMovie for iPhone

You still can’t do real video editing in Photos. You still can’t string clips together, split them in half, add titles, create crossfades, drop in music, and so on. For that, there’s iMovie or Clips for iPhone. Both are free from the App Store.

Step 1: Choose the Photos

Before you can send or post a photo or video, you have to tell iOS which one (or ones) you want to work with. To send just one, well, no big mystery; tap its thumbnail and then tap .

But you can also send a bunch of them in a group—whenever you see a Select button (in an album or the Photos tab, for example).

Tap it and then tap the photos you want to send—or drag through several in a row. With each tap, a appears, meaning, “OK, this one will be included.” (Tap again to remove the checkmark.)

Note that, in iOS 13, you can make the thumbnails bigger, making it easier to see what you’re dealing with. Tap the button, and then either + or − to enlarge or enshrink them (below, right).

Step 2: Preparing to Send

Once you’ve opened a photo (or selected a few), tap .

The Share Sheet appears (“The Share Sheet”). At top, a scrolling row of other photos appears. It lets you add more photos to the one(s) you’ve already selected, or deselect some of them. That’s a lot less crazymaking than having to back out of the Share screen to change your selection.

Below the photos: a row of icons for people (and sharing methods) you use a lot, as described in “The Share Sheet”.

Below that: icons for channels like AirDrop (“AirDrop”), Messages, Mail, Notes, and other apps you’ve installed that can accept photos or videos.

If you’re sending a longish video by Messages, the iPhone compresses it first so it’s small enough to send as a text-message attachment (smaller dimensions, lower picture quality). Then it attaches the clip to an outgoing text message; it’s your job to address it.

If you’re sending a photo by Mail, you may be asked how much you want the photo scaled down from its original size. Tap Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size, using the megabyte indicator as a guide. (Some email systems don’t accept attachments larger than 5 megabytes.) Any video clip you send by email gets compressed—smaller, lower quality—for the same reason.

Scroll down far enough, and you find a list of commands for further photo sharing. They vary depending on what you’ve selected (photo or video) and how many, but you might see any combination of these:

• Copy Photos puts the photo(s) onto the Clipboard, ready for pasting into another app (an outgoing Mail message, for example). Once you’ve opened an app that can accept pasted graphics, double-tap to make the Paste button appear.

• Save Image appears only when you’re looking at a photo somebody has texted or emailed to you. It saves the picture to your own photo collection, so you’ll be able to cherish it for years.

• Shared Albums. You can share batches of photos or videos with other people, either directly to their Apple gadgets or to a private web page. What’s more, they can (with your permission) contribute their own pictures to the album.

  This is a big topic, though, so it gets its own write-up in “Deleting Photos from My Photo Stream”.

• Add to Album. If this is a photo you’ve taken with the phone, you’re now free to file it away into one of the albums you’ve made (“The Albums Tab”).

• Duplicate. Makes a copy of the photo, which you can doctor beyond all recognition.

• Hide. Here’s the option to hide a photo, as described in “Hide a Photo”.

• Slideshow instantly generates a gorgeous, musically accompanied, animated slideshow. The slideshow incorporates both photos and videos—and when there’s sound, the background music actually gets softer so you can hear the audio.

  After the slideshow has begun, tap the screen and then tap Options to see some adjustment controls. For example, a Theme is a canned presentation style, incorporating animations, crossfades, and music. Each makes the photos appear, interact, overlap, and flow away in a different way. You’re offered five choices, some of which display more than one photo at a time.)

  You can also choose among the five pieces of background Music here, opt for None, or tap Music Library to choose a song from your music collection.

  There’s a Repeat option, too, which makes the slideshow play over and over again until you stop it manually, and a speed slider that controls how much time each photo gets.

  While the show is playing, you can tap the screen to produce the Pause () button, or swipe leftward to blow past a photo or video that’s taking too long.

• Copy iCloud Link. With one tap here, you can copy a link to your invisible Clipboard, ready for texting or emailing to someone: a link that lets your recipient add the selected photos to his own copy of Photos! World’s simplest sharing method—and least secure, because he can share that link with anyone.

• Create Watch Face. This one’s for you, Apple Watch owners! Now a picture you took can become the background for a watch-face design.

• Save to Files. Here you can plop some selected photos into one of your iPhone “desktop folders” (see “Files”). You may also have a Save to Dropbox command, if you use that service.

• Assign to Contact. You can use any photo—or part of one—as the headshot for somebody in your Contacts. After that, her photo appears on your screen every time she calls.

  When you tap Assign to Contact, your address book list pops up. Tap the name of the person who goes with this photo.

  Now you see a preview of what the photo will look like when that person calls. This is the Move and Scale screen described in “Adding a Contact on the Fly”. You want to crop the photo and shift it in the frame so only that person is visible (if it’s a group shot)—in fact, probably just the face.

  When you’ve got the person centered, tap Choose.

• Print. You can print a photo easily enough, provided that you’ve hooked up your iPhone to a compatible printer. Once you’ve opened the photo, tap the button and then tap Print. The rest goes down as described in “AirPrint: Printing from the Phone”.

• AirPlay. This button offers a list of nearby AirPlay gadgets—the only one you’ve probably heard of is Apple TV—so you can display the current photo on your TV or another screen.

• Use as Wallpaper. Wallpaper is the background photo that appears in either of two places: the Home screens (plastered behind your app icons) or the Lock screen (which appears every time you wake the iPhone).

  This button lets you replace Apple’s standard photos with one of your photos. It opens the Move and Scale screen, which lets you fit your photo within the wallpaper “frame.” Pinch or spread to enlarge the shot; drag your finger on the screen to scroll and center it.

  Finally, tap Set. You now specify where you want to use this wallpaper; tap Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, or Set Both (if you want the same picture in both places).

  You can also change your wallpaper within Settings, as described in “Siri & Search”.

• Save as Video. Here’s the new option mentioned in “Portrait Mode”. It turns a Live Video into a regular old three-second video clip, which is easier to share with non-Apple people (yes, there are a few left).

• Edit Actions. Once again, iOS offers a way to rearrange the Share options—this time, the list of commands—or to add new buttons. If you don’t have an Apple Watch, for example, you may as well turn off the Create Watch Face option.

• Shortcuts. If you’ve created any Shortcuts (“Make Your Own Shortcuts”) that involve photos or videos, you’ll see their names in this list too.

Step 3: Options for Messages or AirDrop

In iOS 13, a new strip appears at the top of the screen when you’re about to share some pix or vids. It says “9 Photos Selected” (or whatever) and offers an Options button.

Options appears no matter which sending method you’re about to choose, but it affects only two sharing methods: Messages and AirDrop.

• Send As. When you’re sending a big video or a bunch of photos in Messages, do you really want to force your recipients to burn up all that data downloading your stuff? If so, choose Individual Photos.

  But what may be a better option awaits: iCloud Link. It makes Photos post your photos and videos to a private web page and sends only the link to them to your recipients. (Automatic means Photos will use the iCloud Link option automatically if you’re sending four or more photos, or a really big video.) This way, the recipients can view the photos on a web page, with the option to download only the ones they really want. On the other hand, your link expires in 30 days.

• Location. Ordinarily, every photo you take remembers where you took it. Here you’re given the option to strip away that information as you share, which could be important if you’re a cheater or a spy.

• All Photos Data. When you’re sending photos and videos using AirDrop (“AirDrop”), you might want to send only the finished, edited, polished product. They’ll receive exactly what they’d get if you used Messages or Mail. If that’s how you want it, turn off All Photos Data.

  But if you turn that switch on, your recipients get the original-quality photos and videos, complete with descriptions and keywords you may have applied. Even more amazingly, they get the editing history; on their own phones or Macs; they can undo or change any edits you’ve applied! All Photos Data means “These photos will be every bit as editable on my recipients’ machines as pictures and videos they’ve taken themselves.”

Deleting Photos from My Photo Stream

Here’s the thing about My Photo Stream: You might think you’re taking a private picture with your phone, forgetting that your spouse or parent will see it seconds later on the family iPad.

Fortunately, you can delete incriminating photos from My Photo Stream. Just select the thumbnail of the photo you want to delete, and then tap . The confirmation box warns you that you’re about to delete the photo from all your iCloud machines (and, for shared streams, the machines of everyone who’s subscribed to your photographic output).

If you haven’t saved it to a different album or roll, it’s gone for good when you tap Delete Photo.

Share Some Photos

To share some of your masterpieces with your adoring fans, do this:

1. Choose the photos.

   Open the Photos app. You can open just one photo, open an album, or use the Select button to select any bunch of pictures.

2. Choose the album.

   Tap . On the Share sheet, tap Add to Shared Album (facing page, top left). Photos proposes putting the photo into whatever shared album you used last, but by tapping its name, you can choose either a different shared album or New Shared Album (bottom left).

3. Specify the audience.

   You’re asked for the iCloud phone number or email addresses of your audience members. Hit and choose their addresses just as you would address an outgoing email. For your convenience, a list of recent sharees appears below the To box.

4. Tap Next.

   You return to the original sharing windoid, where you can type a comment, if you like (“Here are my best pix of the reunion!”). In theory, you and other people can add to this album later. That’s why you’re offered the chance to caption each new batch.

5. Tap Post.

   Your recipients’ phones now get a notification that you’ve shared some pictures with them!

At any time, you can look over the Shared Album Activity at the top of the For You tab in the Photos app. Here, for your amusement, is a visual record of everything that’s gone on in Shared Photo Album Land: photos you’ve posted, photos other people have posted, comments back and forth, likes, and so on. It’s your personal photographic Facebook.

Shared-Photo Management

Once you’ve shared some pictures like this, here’s how you can keep track or change your settings:

• Look over your shared albums by tapping the Albums tab and scrolling down to Shared Albums. (They also show up on the For You tab, under Shared Album Activity.) Then tap See All.

• Add more photos to an album. Tap the shared album’s thumbnail, and then . Find the additional photos or videos (use the All Photos or Albums tabs at the bottom), choose them, tap Done, add a comment if you like, and then tap Post. (You can also go the other way—by selecting the photos first, anywhere in the Photos app. Then hit , then Shared Albums, then the name of the album you’ve already shared, and then Post.)

• Delete some. Tap the shared album, then Select; choose the photos to delete, and then hit . Confirm with a tap on Delete Photo(s). (You’re not deleting photos from your collection—you’re just unsharing them.)

• Change who can see this album. Tap Albums, then the shared album, and then People (previous page, right). At top, the list identifies everyone with whom you’ve shared the album. To add a new subscriber, tap Invite People. To delete a subscriber, tap the name and then (at the bottom of the contact card) tap Remove Subscriber.

• Change who can post to this album. Your subscribers can contribute photos and videos to your album. That’s a fantastic feature when it contains pictures of an event where there was a crowd: a wedding, show, political rally, picnic, badminton tournament. Everyone who was there can enhance the gallery with shots taken from their own points of view with their own phones or cameras.

  Subscribers Can Post, on the same People screen, is the on/off switch for this feature.

• Make the photos public. If you turn on Public Website (on the People screen), then even people who aren’t members of the Apple cult will be able to see these photos. The invitees will get an email containing a web address. It links to a hidden page on the iCloud website that contains your published photos.

  When you turn this switch on, the web address of your new gallery appears in light-gray type. Tap Share Link for a selection of methods for sending the link to people: by Message, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, AirDrop, and so on.

  What they’ll see is a mosaic of pictures, laid out in a grid on a single sort of web poster. Your fans can download their favorites by clicking the button. (You can’t add comments or “like” photos on the web, however.)

  TIP

  If you click one of these medium-sized photos, you enter slideshow mode, in which one photo at a time fills your web browser window. Click the arrow buttons to move through them.

• Adjust notifications. If the Notifications switch is on (also on the People screen), your phone will notify you each time someone adds photos or videos to your album, clicks the “Like” button for a photo, or leaves a comment.

• Delete the Shared Album. If the whole thing gets out of hand, you can slam the door in your subscribers’ faces by making the entire album disappear. On the shared album’s People screen, hit Delete Shared Album.

Receiving a Photo Album on Your Gadget

When other people share photo albums with you, your phone makes a little warble, and a notification banner appears: “[Your buddy’s name] invited you to join ‘[name of shared photo batch]’.”

Simultaneously, a badge like () appears on the Photos app icon and on the For You tab within Photos, letting you know how many albums have come your way.

You can tap the new album’s name to see what’s inside it; tap Accept.

Once you’re subscribed, you view the photos and movies as you would any album—with a couple of differences. First, you can tap Comment to make worshipful or snarky remarks, or tap Like to offer your silent support.

You can also snag a copy of somebody’s published photo or video for yourself. With the photo before you, tap the button to see the usual sharing options—and tap Save Image. Now the picture or video isn’t some virtual online wisp—it’s a solid, tangible electronic copy in your own photo pool.

If your buddy has turned on Subscribers Can Post for this album, you can send your own photos and clips into it; everybody who’s subscribed to it (and, of course, its owner) will see them.

To do that, tap the on the album’s page of thumbnails; choose your photos and movies; tap Done; add a comment; and tap Post.

Sharing Suggestions

If you’re using iCloud Photos (“iCloud Photos”), then the For You tab contains pictures and videos that Apple’s artificial-intelligence bot thinks might interest you (next page, left). These tiles appear when the app notices two things about a clump of pictures:

• There are people in the shots—especially people whose faces it recognizes, because you’ve tagged them in the People mode (“The Search Tab”).

  

• They seem to be clustered around a certain time or place, suggesting that this was an outing, a vacation, an event, a party, or whatever.

iOS is attempting to solve the age-old problem of different attendees having different photos of the same event. It lets all of you share all your photos of the same event with everybody.

If Photos knows who’s in these photos, it says, “Share with Casey Robin?” (above, left). If not, it just says, “Share with friends?” Here’s how to proceed:

1. Tap the preview photo to open the details page for this batch.

   Here’s where you can see thumbnails of the photos that Photos intends to send (above, right).

2. Tap Select, and choose the photos you want to send.

   If you want to send most of them, tap the rejects to turn off their blue checkmarks. If you want to send only a few, tap Deselect All and then tap to turn on the blue checkmarks.

   TIP

   In selection mode, you can drag your finger across the thumbnails to select a bunch of them quickly.

3. Tap Next. Choose the recipients.

   Now you’re on the Choose People to Share With screen. If Photos recognizes any faces, you’ll see their names.

   NOTE

   If you haven’t yet associated a Photos face with that person’s information in Contacts, you can do so now. Tap the name, tap Choose Existing Contact, and then find that person in your Contacts list. (Or Create New Contact, if you don’t have this person in Contacts yet.) You won’t have to repeat this process.

   If you’d like to share these photos with somebody not already identified, tap Add People; on the next screen, tap to choose the person’s name from Contacts (or type enough of the name until it’s recognized). Repeat until you’ve added everyone. Tap Done.

4. Tap Share in Messages.

   Now Messages opens, with your photo set represented as a link, all ready to send. Add a note, if you like, and then tap .

Let’s say you just shared some family-reunion photos with your Aunt Gertie. When she taps your link, she sees a screen almost identical to the one shown on the facing page at left—except that she sees an Add All button (meaning she can add all those photos to her own photo library). Of course, she can also tap Select and choose only the winners.

Ah, but here’s the cool part. If Gertie also took some pictures at the reunion, she sees, on the same screen, a Share Back notice, so she can send her photos back to you. That way, you each wind up with a full collection (or as full as you choose). These are full-resolution original photos. (When she taps View, she sees her own set of Family Reunion photos, complete with a Select button, so she can choose which photos to send to you.)

A few additional elements to Sharing Suggestions:

• The Sharing Suggestions are just another form of the Shared Albums feature described in “Deleting Photos from My Photo Stream”. For example, once you’ve shared an album, its thumbnail appears at the top of the For You tab, under the heading Shared Album Activity. It lets you monitor who’s got your pictures. You can also leave comments, or read other people’s comments, exactly as with the Shared Albums feature.

  

• If you want to withdraw your invitation, tap the thumbnail of the shared set (under Recently Shared); tap ; tap Stop Sharing. Incredibly, those photos now vanish from your friends’ collections.

• Sharing Suggestions works by sending a link (via Messages). Keep in mind that anyone who has this link can see those photos. Aunt Gertie is capable of sharing that link with total strangers.

• You can also see the identical Sharing Suggestions within the Messages app, which makes sense, since you may well be chatting with the person in those photos. Tap the Photos app button (), and then swipe up to see them.

• Sharing Suggestions aren’t available immediately. It takes the phone a day or so to process all your pictures and choose which ones are worth grouping.

Recording Screen Video

There’s no way to take a screenshot of some corners of iOS. For example, when the phone is ringing, pressing the screenshot button combination sends the call to voicemail instead of capturing the screen image. In those situations, you may have to rely on a backup trick: the iPhone’s screen-recording feature.

Yes, for the first time in cellphone history, you can create video recordings of the screen—with narration, if you like. It’s fantastic as a teaching tool, when you want to capture some anomaly to show tech support, or to demo an app. There’s no app for that, no Settings page that even mentions it; the only way to record the screen is with the Control Center.

Install the Record Screen () button onto the Control Center, as described in “Customizing the Control Center”. Tap it.

If you’d like to record narration, long-press the button instead, and then tap to turn the microphone on. Here, too, you can specify where you want the finished video to go. That’s usually Photos, but some video apps may list themselves here, too. Then hit Start Recording.

You see a 3-2-1 countdown, which is intended to give you time to get out of the Control Center and into whatever app you’re trying to record.

Now do whatever it is you want to capture. (The phone’s status bar or left ear turns red to remind you that you’re rolling; unfortunately, that red patch will be part of the finished video.) To stop recording, tap that red bar, or open the Control Center and tap the button again.

A notification appears: “Screen Recording video saved to Photos.” If you do nothing, the finished video lands in your Photos app with all your other videos—with pristine quality and smooth motion, ready to share as you see fit. If you tap it, you jump into Photos to view your video.