Apple's new AI photo tool can virtually move your camera after you shoot

Apple Photos is getting two new AI-powered features, along with updates to the existing "Clean Up" tool. Image: Apple

Apple has announced iOS 27, the latest version of its mobile operating system, which focuses more on stability and refinement rather than loading up with new features. However, it shared a few additions, including one that raised a few eyebrows at DPReview: generative AI-powered photo editing.

The first change is an update to the "Clean Up" tool, which lets you remove unwanted elements in your image. Apple says the new version will provide "better quality and more realistic infill," even in complex scenes. The company is also adding an "Extend" tool, letting you effectively do a negative crop and use AI to add a simulacrum of what was outside the frame of your original image. Apple pitches it as a way to give your subject a bit more space, or to level an image without changing the composition.

When using Spatial Reframing, the blurry areas indicate where the photos app will have to use generative Extend.

While both features likely sound familiar to anyone who's spent any time in modern Photoshop, the company's last feature, "Spatial Reframing" is a bit more advanced. It uses AI to essentially change perspective, letting you virtually move the camera around to reframe a subject, and having AI fill in the background needed to sell the effect.

While the "Spatial" branding makes it seem like it uses the depth data that powers other features like virtual bokeh, that doesn't seem to be the case. Apple says you'll even be able to reframe older images, and ones taken using other cameras.

Apple says any images made using these features will include "a hidden SynthID watermark" to mark them as having been edited with AI. The company also says that some AI features, like image generation, will have "daily usage limits" because they rely on server-side processing. It's currently unclear what those limits are, exactly which features they'll apply to, or how much they'll be extended if you pay for the company's iCloud+ plans.

In many ways, this is Apple playing catch-up with other phone makers, as companies like Google and Samsung have introduced slews of AI-powered features*, like the ability to add the photographer into a group photo, combine several photos into a single image where everyone is smiling and looking at the camera, and resize/move elements of an image and clean up the background. But it's also interesting that there's one line Apple isn't crossing in the Photos app: giving you a tool to add generated imagery into your pictures, something both Google and Samsung let you do.

When it was introducing the features, Apple said it had a "deep respect for the craft of photography," and that it wanted to give photographers AI tools that "enhance their images in ways that respect the original moment."

This isn't a new take from Apple – in 2024, it said photos should be things that "really, actually happened" – but it's also not a hardline one. It's hard to ignore that, literally less than two minutes earlier in the presentation, there was a demo of using Apple's Image Playground app to add an AI-generated cake into someone's hands to create a birthday party invite. So while that functionality may not exist in the Photos app, it's clear Apple isn't taking a fundamental stance against using generative AI to completely alter an image and the context around it.

If there has to be a dedicated Siri mode in the camera app, surely it shouldn't come before actual photographic options like portrait and panorama mode. Image: Apple

Aside from the editing tools, it doesn't seem like Apple's making too many changes to the photography experience, which isn't necessarily a surprise given it completely redesigned the camera app last year. It's adding a new Siri mode to the camera, which may be annoying for those who already find the interface cluttered, though we'll have to wait for the beta versions to be released to know for sure whether it can be removed as an option.

It's also possible we haven't seen everything new with iOS 27 yet. Apple will occasionally hold back announcing new features tied to hardware, so it's possible that there'll be further changes if, say, the company announces a new form-factor phone later this year (whatever that may be).

* Arguably, one of Google's most useful AI features is a virtual "Coach" that suggests how to improve your image as you're taking it; who needs Spatial Reframing when your phone was smart enough to tell you how to frame it in the first place?