There will always be the textbook-handsome Bryan Ferry, who created art pop with the eye of a perfectionist, delivering one classy hit after another with a certain steadfastness. Paul McCartney too continues to emphasise on the need of delivering something meaningful. It is the kind of consistency technology companies ought to aim for. And it is exactly what Apple has managed to achieve with its latest iOS 27 developer beta release, particularly in everything to do with photography.
When artificial intelligence entered our lives, the relationship between photography and truth became complicated, giving way to the age of the image as hallucination. Suddenly, AI systems are allowing anyone to rewrite history in minutes.
But there is hope. One of the most used camera systems in the world sits in more than a billion pockets globally — the iPhone. With iOS 27, Apple has pushed the boundaries of what Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, and artificial intelligence in general can do, but at no point is the truth compromised.
A complicated picture from which the man blocking the view of those wearing Apple Vision Pro has been removed using the High Quality option in Clean Up
A number of new photography-related features have been introduced, which the public will get to experience in the coming months. The Photos app now draws on powerful image models to help you make edits while respecting the original moment as it was captured. Photos adjusted with Apple Intelligence will automatically include a hidden SynthID watermark to identify those that have been edited with AI.
Always eager to have a conversation around photography, Jon McCormack, Apple’s vice-president of Camera and Photos software engineering, and Della Huff, Apple’s senior manager of Camera and Photos product marketing, sat down withThe Telegraph during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to walk us through the list of new features.
“What we’re really doing when we’re taking photographs is we’re being journalists of our own life. We are recording what we’re doing — the small moments, the big moments, everything in between. And it’s really important that as we are documenting the history of ourselves, our family, our friends, our loved ones, we’re doing that in a way that preserves those moments and keeps them intact,” said McCormack.
At the same time, McCormack and Huff recognise that we are human too. There are moments when we are taking great pictures of family members during a holiday but someone in a particularly bright shirt walks across, spoiling a moment that would not come back. Then there are moments when kids being kids would refuse to look directly at the camera. What if the man in the bright yellow shirt could be left out of the picture without ruining the background? What if the 15-year-old could be made to look at the camera after a photo has been taken? Apple now makes all of this possible.
“The place that we landed on was this idea of composition. We want to help people with iPhone capture their memories, and then, with the edit tools, perfect their memories. Composition is probably the hardest thing for ordinary people to work on. Traditionally, you’d have to hire a retoucher who is skilled in the nuances of photography. Why can’t we give those tools to everybody? At the same time, it’s important to us that in all of these things, we’re retaining the integrity of the moment, because we still see all of this in the context of being a journalist of your own life,” said McCormack.
Clean Up tool has received a major upgrade, allowing users to remove distractions with better quality and more realistic infill, even when the scene is complex.
The powerful trio
There are three clever tools available when editing photos on iOS 27. The first is Clean Up. It is a feature that has existed before, but it has now been significantly improved. On any photo, you can choose between Auto, Fast, and High Quality models when cleaning up an image. The High Quality option uses Apple Private Cloud Compute, ensuring complete privacy. It works flawlessly in the few hours we have used it so far. For example, if there is a bottle in front of a person, partially obscuring their face, you can remove the bottle and AI will recreate the portion of the face behind it. Everything looks entirely natural.
The second feature is called Extend. When publishing photos, there are always those shots that could have done with a little more space around the subject. Extend uses Private Cloud Compute to get things done. You can even use the crop tool to activate Extend. The results look natural.
Third, there is something called Reframe, which is a spatial tool. There are always moments when somebody is not looking at the camera, or when you wish the photo had been taken from a slightly higher angle. Reframe is the tool to fix those nagging flaws. It is like moving the camera after the photo has already been taken.
“AI is a big buzzword in tech these days, and it’s bringing to bear some really amazing user experiences,” said Huff. Apple is no stranger to artificial intelligence, which arrived earlier in the form of machine learning.
“I have to remind myself that this is actually the tenth anniversary of introducing the Memories feature in the Photos app. More than ten years ago, we were thinking about how we could improve the experience in the Photos app using on-device machine learning intelligence. For that first feature, it was about using ML to understand the people and events and trips that users had been on. Since then, we’ve continued to figure out how we can use intelligence to help you have a better experience — whether navigating your photo library, finding what you’re looking for, or making edits. Natural language search is just one example,” she said.
Apple has also used artificial intelligence to solve the age-old challenge of searching for specific photos using natural language — something like ‘Sandra dancing in a red dress’ — as well as making it easier to find images involving the people and pets who matter most.
With Spatial Reframing, users can improve the composition of a photo after it has been taken
This is not AI for the sake of adding AI. In fact, you will not feel AI at work when using any of the new features arriving with iOS 27, which is the real joy and beauty of this software update.
It is unlike what other companies are doing, such as Google and Samsung. There have been instances where other companies allow users to remove unwanted objects but simultaneously, and forcefully, add objects to a picture that were never there — a television replaced by a tablet, for instance.
Not Apple. You do not need to know Photoshop to get things done.
“The first thing we think about with photos is that they’re yours. They’re private. They don’t belong to anybody else. Nobody should be able to look over your shoulder. And so Private Cloud Compute is really important,” said McCormack.
Not all AI is the same
The best camera is always the one you have easy access to, and for many people, that is the iPhone. Apple has added a number of features beyond the three editing tools to ensure you have all the help you need in the photography department.
iOS 27 is an early developer beta and things are going to get better. The look and feel of the Photos app remains familiar. Look closer, however, and there is a Sync Immediately feature which does exactly what it says with iCloud. Many of us share iCloud with family members, and when we take photos, they do not always appear right away. This feature solves that and immediately syncs photos to the Shared Library space.
In the Settings application, there is an option for Cellular Data. With Unlimited Updates, you can continuously sync photos over cellular without having to worry about it.
Another nifty feature is Show Ratings Controls. It is one of the most helpful additions here. When we take four or five similar photos, we often try to judge which is the better one. With this new feature, you can assign a rating of one to five stars to similar photos. Professional photographers will appreciate this.
One of the most significant features involves AirDrop, a technology iPhone users have relied on for years to share large files. AirDrop has become remarkably fast, which will prove particularly handy when sharing heavy video files.
Also useful for many users are filter options. You can now filter photos and videos by Media Type. Within this section, there is something called Captured By Me, which is essentially the camera roll. It will not include imports or screenshots.
Apple does not want users to go wild with artificial intelligence and produce all manner of fakery. Truth remains sacrosanct. The Extend function, for example, will allow you to expand the environment around a person only to a degree; you cannot extend it infinitely with AI.
Users can also expand images with the Extend tool to give their subjects more breathing room
“Not all AI is the same. The way that you train and the way that you adapt and the way that you refine is really important. We’ve got a lot of really smart people at Apple who care about the ethics of training AI and getting the models to output within the guardrails and with the ethics that we have in place for AI,” said Huff.
Disclosure is an important element in the Apple approach. If an AI edit has been made to a photograph, it needs to be watermarked discreetly, so that there is no confusion in the future.
“The primary thing is disclosure. Whenever you make a generative change to a photograph, we put it in the metadata. Later this year, we’re also going to be adopting a technology called SynthID, which is a much more durable way of embedding something inside the image — an identification tool that says this is an AI-generated image,” said McCormack.
SynthID technology adds an invisible watermark indicating that these images have been altered with generative AI. Any platform on which you share the photo may be able to flag it as AI-edited.
This naturally raises the question of what the no-go zones are when it comes to AI in photography.
McCormack returns to the idea of being a journalist of our lives. “We have a North Star. You are being a journalist of your own life, and it’s really important that we give you the tools to be able to do that. Now, if you don’t want to do that — if you want to go wildly crazy — there’s an entire App Store full of things for you to go and play with. But our take on that is that we want to support the act of people saying, these are my kids, this is my family, this is my life. At the same time, kids are moving too quickly, and you need to just touch up things around the edges. Authenticity matters. Disclosure matters. Ultimately, what we’re doing here is celebrating life, and I think it’s really important to do that with a level of integrity.”
Perfecting memories
The iOS 27 developer beta we are working with is still in its early days, and RAW images are not yet supported. Later this summer, however, ProRAW images are expected to gain support for the new editing tools.
“The other good news is that these new edit features, just like every other Photos editing feature, are non-destructive. So they don’t do anything to your original image. The original RAW will still be there. What they will do is create a new version and send it back. So if you were to revert that photo to the original, your image is still intact,” said Huff.
Given the limits placed on how far one can go with editing a photo, it underscores how seriously Apple takes the matter of safety guardrails. In all cases of extending a photo or using Clean Up, the missing details need to be filled in. Rather than recreating the entire image, pixels are added that reflect the original moment.
“We’re taking our customers and giving them superpowers they never had before. Prior to tools like this existing, you’d have to have a decade of experience in photo editing. We want everybody to be able to do that. And again, it’s not because we want people to rewrite history or fundamentally change things. It’s just because we recognise the humanity in it — people are going to say, I missed the moment by a fraction of a second, or by five degrees, and I want to put it back. We think people’s memories are worth perfecting,” said McCormack.
Huff added: “The idea of editing in photography carries a lot of creativity with it. And we want to support our users in their creative use cases.”
Ordinary people care about artificial intelligence only to a certain extent. What they truly care about is far simpler: “I took a photo of my kid, and I missed a moment.” The tools are there to fix exactly that.
“You heard Craig Federighi say this — we’re not going to do AI for the sake of AI. The real thing is finding out what problems need to be solved and whether AI can be used to solve them for people. That’s what we are trying to do, whether that’s in the Photos app, or in Safari, or in Messages, or with Siri, or with Visual Intelligence,” said Huff.
Photography has always been an act of faith — a belief that the moment you captured is the moment that existed. The rise of AI threatened to quietly dissolve that contract, turning the camera into a tool for invention rather than record. Apple, with iOS 27, has chosen a different path.
What makes these new features remarkable is not the technology itself, impressive as it is, but the philosophy driving it. Clean Up, Extend, and Reframe are not designed to fabricate; they are designed to recover — to retrieve what the eye saw but the lens could not quite hold. The SynthID watermark, the Private Cloud Compute backbone, the hard limits on how far any edit can travel: all of it points to a company that has thought carefully about where the line sits between helping and deceiving.
In a world where images are increasingly distrusted, that is not a small thing. It is, in fact, everything.