The list of changes in the Photos app is much longer than in any other app, though most of them are small. I won’t describe them all here, though I refer you to Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos; Jason is currently updating it for the version 27 operating systems.
- Shared album improvements: When you share an album via iCloud, other participants can now see and interact with it even on Windows PCs and Android phones. In addition, you can “upgrade” your shared albums to show photos and videos at full resolution and enable several other features. To do so, right-click or Control-click an album in the sidebar and choose Upgrade Shared Album; this walks you through a series of steps, after which Photos spends a considerable amount of time—perhaps hours—thinking.
At the end of the process, a Manage Shared Album button appears at the top of the window. Click this to open a dialog with extensive sharing options:
- Permissions: Click the More button next to any participant to change their permission to any of three levels: Can View and Comment, Can Add Photos, or Can Manage Album and Photos. You can also show each person’s contact info or remove the participant, and you can invite new participants.
- Copy Album Link: You can get a link to the shared album and set whether it works for People You Choose or Anyone with the Link.
- Access Requests: Turn this on to permit other people with the link to request access, which you must then manually approve.
- Make Album Temporary: If you turn this on, the album becomes ephemeral, disappearing from Photos after 30 days. To prevent any photos or videos in the album from disappearing too, you must save them to your library first.
- Allow Notifications: Turn this on to be notified when there are changes to the shared album.
- Delete Shared Album: Click this to delete the album completely.
Other devices must be running iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 to use the upgraded features.
There’s a downside to upgrading, though: these higher-resolution shared photos now count toward your iCloud Drive quota, which may require you to buy a more expensive iCloud+ plan.
- New Clean Up: Apple has rebuilt the Apple Intelligence-driven Clean Up feature rolled out in macOS 26 (and on other platforms), and it works substantially better.
- Spatial Reframing: If a photo was taken from an inauspicious angle, you can now adjust the angle, within limits, for a more pleasing effect, thanks to Apple Intelligence.
- Extending: Suppose a photo is cropped too narrowly, or that the subject is off-center. Photos can now use Apple Intelligence to fill in areas adjacent to the area actually captured by generating new pixels that seamlessly blend in with what’s already in the photo.
Both Spatial Reframing and Extending are inventing details, not extracting data from the photo. Be sure you want photo-generated components in your image.
