These are my favorite iOS 27 Photos app features.
Just a heads up: the version available right now is still the beta, and I don’t recommend downloading it on your daily phone because it’s a test version, meaning it’s super buggy. The final version should come around mid-September, along with the launch of the new iPhone 18 lineup.
Obviously, the new Siri AI brings a lot of cool features to the entire system, but what really caught my eye were the new photo features. The Photos app got some insane generative AI and organization tools.
Clean Up
The first tool is called Clean Up, and it uses Apple Intelligence. This isn’t a new tool per se, but it was upgraded on iOS 27 and it now works a lot better. To find Clean Up, go to the photo that you want to edit. Then you’re going to tap Edit at the bottom, go to Tools and tap Clean Up.
Instead of just blurring or smudging pixels like older tools used to do, this one is fully generative. What it does is it uses a hybrid AI system. For simple edits, a fast model running directly on your phone will handle it instantly. It will handle it pretty well, but for complex backgrounds, your phone will safely hand over the task to Apple’s private cloud servers. In that case, powerful foundation models analyze the surrounding patterns like light, textures, whether it’s brick, grass, or water, and they will completely recreate that part of the image from scratch.
It’s incredibly precise and it works surprisingly well without making the photo look fake, which is surprising, and it even generates parts of your body if needed. And again, it works. I thought it would look really bad, but it doesn’t.
Extend
This is easily one of the coolest tools this year because it handles the zoom out factor. So let’s say you have a vertical photo, but you need it to be horizontal or you simply think you need to zoom out a bit. The only thing you need to do is select Extend.
It already zooms out for you. You can simply just pinch your fingers to zoom out past the edges of the original photo. And when you zoom out and tap Extend, Apple Intelligence literally generates the rest of the image to fill in those blank gaps. It will analyze the grass, sky, buildings, or whatever you have in your shot and seamlessly generate brand new pixels to expand the boundaries of your photo.
Reframe
Right next to the Extend feature, we have the Reframe tool. This is perfect for fixing a bad composition after the fact. So let’s say someone took a photo of you, but left way too much empty space on one side, totally ignoring the rule of thirds, or you simply want to reframe it.
Again, when you tap Reframe, Apple Intelligence will analyze the subject and the background and you can position it however you like. It doesn’t let you switch to a high angle. It doesn’t really move that way, just a tiny bit. But you can switch sides or move it down. You can move high, but it’s just a little bit.
Just like the Extend feature, it uses generative AI to instantly build out the background on whichever area was lacking pixels. So it basically fixes the bad camera angle. In this situation, again, it works pretty well.
Save Video Frame as Photo
Another huge improvement in iOS 27 is how the system handles videos. In the past, if you wanted a photo from a video, you would pretty much just take a screenshot. And the problem was that screenshots lose quality and strip out all the data from your photo.
But on iOS 27, you can actually save a video frame directly as a photo. The only thing that you need to do is tap the three dots in the top-right corner and Save Video Frame as Photo. This will extract the actual frame from the video file. So the quality is much better than a screenshot, which is, in my opinion, one of the most important things. And plus it’s supposed to maintain all the metadata, like the exact location, time, camera information, all the settings from when the video was recorded.
Captions in Photos
Still speaking of videos, the Photos app in iOS 27 lets you enable system captions directly inside the app and you can even change their visual style. Just tap the caption icon at the bottom right, select the language, tap On, and you can even change the style. You can choose Classic, Large Text, Outline Text, Transparent Background, or you can even create your own.
This is super convenient if you’re watching your clips on mute. One quick thing to note is that this captions feature is built for viewing inside your library. It will not function as a dedicated captioning app, for example. That means you cannot export this video with these captions baked into it and upload it to Instagram or TikTok, for example. But for personal use, it’s a great addition.
Memories
When you go and open a collection or a trip and press Play, the app automatically generates a custom slideshow for you. And it even adds music. It mixes your photos and videos, cuts them into the beat of the music, and creates a full video for you.
Now, something nice is that you can customize the visual look. You can change the transition style and swap the soundtrack. The options are Customized Look, Transition and Duration, Music, and Loop. You can make this memory better — personalize it the way you like it. And then once you like how it looks, you can save the entire memory or easily share it with your friends.
