PICTURE PERFECT
iPhone owners to receive huge Photos upgrade with 11 new iOS 18 features – and they’re arriving in a matter of weeks
You can see how the highly anticipated AI-powered Image Playground feature works in the video above
IPHONE owners are about to receive a huge upgrade to their Photos app, which Apple has called its "biggest redesign ever".
There are a whopping 11 new Photos features that will be arriving in iOS 18, the software update expected to land on iPhones in a few weeks time.
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Of the 11 new Photo features, six of them rely solely on Apple Intelligence - the company's sparkly new AI offering.
Photo boost
iPhone owners who are eligible for the iOS 18 update will be able to use five features right away, including:
Smarter Collections - Apple's collections - the mini photo albums that are automatically generated - will organise your library by topics like Recent Days, Trips and People & Pets.
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Pinned Collections - These give iPhone owners quick access to the collections or albums they love the most inside the Photo app.
Picture Carousel - A new swipe-through widget with a selection of snaps that displays handpicked photos in a poster-like view.
Locked Photos - Lock the Photos app behind Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
Send higher-res photos more easily - With the long-awaited RCS support, iPhone owners will be able to send photos to Android owners over Wi-Fi or 5G/4G.
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RCS support is set to bring eight iMessage-style features to texts between iPhone and Android users, including:
- Higher-resolution photos and videos
- Audio messages
- Typing indicators
- Read receipts
- Wi-Fi messaging between iPhones and Android devices
- Improved group chats, including the ability for iPhone users to leave a conversation that includes Android users
- Improved encryption compared to SMS
- Share location with people inside text threads
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Apple Intelligence
Features that require Apple Intelligence to work are forecast to arrive slightly later than the initial iOS 18 features. These include:
Clean Up - A new AI-powered photo editing tool that lets users remove unwanted objects or people from photos.
Photo editing with Siri - The voice assistant will be able to adjust a photo's color tone, brightness, and contrast from spoken instructions.
And that's not the only way Siri is getting smarter.
Image Playground - This feature is designed to let users create images using text-based prompts.
The AI can create personalised images, in sketch, illustration and animation styles, based on the people in your photo album.
You can see how this feature works in the video above.
Natural language search - This will give users the option to search photos and videos using phrases like "Katie with stickers on her face" or "Mum on her birthday".
Search within videos - iPhone owners will also be able to search for scenes midway through a video, such as "When Katie takes her first steps" or "When Mum blows the birthday candles out".
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Memory Movies - Which will automatically create personalised videos based on user-specified prompts, like Brooklyn dinner party or Edinburgh weekend.
While their arrival will be slightly belated, Apple boss Tim Cook is confident that Apple Intelligence features will arrive "by the end of the calendar year".
iPhone tricks to try today
Here are some of the best...
- Typing cursor – When typing, hold down the space bar to turn your keyboard into a trackpad, letting you move around words and sentences more easily
- Close all Safari tabs – To do this in one go, simply hold the overlapped squares in the bottom right-hand corner, and press close all tabs
- Delete lots of photos quickly – Hold down on a photo and then drag your finger diagonally in Photos to select lots of images at once, then hit delete
- Convert currency quickly – Swipe down from the top of your Home screen (or swipe left to right on an iPhone X or later model), then tap in the bar and type a currency (like $200) and it will automatically covert to your local currency
- Check if you're due a battery upgrade – Batteries inside smartphones degrade over time. Just go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health, and check out the Maximum Capacity reading. Generally a battery is considered worn when you're down to 80% capacity. If you're below, you can buy a battery swap from Apple
- Move apps around faster – Hold an app until it starts wiggling, then (while still holding) tap other apps, causing them to stack so you can move them around easier
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