Firing Up the Camera

Photographic opportunities are frequently fleeting; by the time you fish the phone from your pocket, wake it, unlock it, find the Camera app, and wait for it to load, the magic moment may be gone forever.

Fortunately, there’s a much quicker way to get to the Camera app: Once the phone is awake, at the Lock screen, swipe to the left. (Drag the background—not one of the notification banners.)

The Camera app opens directly. Over time, the wake-and-swipe ritual becomes natural, fluid—and fast.

By the way: This shortcut bypasses the Lock screen. Any random stranger who picks up your phone can, therefore, jump directly into picture-taking mode, without your password, fingerprint, or Face ID.

That stranger can’t do much damage, though. She can take new photos, or delete the new photos taken during her session—but the photos you’ve already taken are off-limits, and the features that could damage your reputation (editing, emailing, and posting) are unavailable. She would have to be able to open the Photos app to get to those.

Camera Modes

The Camera app can capture six or seven kinds of photo and video, depending on your phone model. By swiping your finger horizontally anywhere on the screen (not just on the mode labels), you switch among its modes. Here they are, from left to right:

• Time-Lapse. This mode speeds up your video, yet somehow keeps it stable. You can reduce a two-hour bike ride into 20 seconds of superfast playback.

• Slo-Mo. Wow, what gorgeousness! You get a video filmed at 120 or 240 frames a second—so it plays back at one-quarter or one-eighth speed, incredibly smoothly. Fantastic for sports, tender smiles, and cannonballs into the pool.

• Video. Here’s your basic camcorder mode: 4K video on the 6s and later models, high definition on earlier ones.

• Photo. This is the primary mode for taking pictures.

• Portrait. Available only on the 7 Plus, 8 Plus, and X-class iPhone models, whose two camera lenses create a softly blurred background that looks super-professional. (The iPhone XR has only one lens on the back, but it simulates the same effect using clever software.)

• Square. Why would Apple go to the trouble of creating a whole camera mode devoted to taking square, not rectangular, pictures? Answer: Instagram, which prefers square pictures.

• Pano. Captures super-wide-angle panoramic photos.

All of these modes are described in this chapter, but in a more logical order: still photos first, and then video modes.

Tap to Focus

All right: You’ve opened the Camera app, and the mode is set to Photo. See the yellow box that appears briefly on the screen?

It’s telling you where the iPhone will focus, the area it examines to calculate the overall brightness of the photo (exposure), and the portion that will determine the overall white balance of the scene (the color cast).

If you’re taking a picture of people, the iPhone tries to lock in on a face—up to 10 faces, actually—and calculate the focus and exposure so that they look right.

But sometimes there are no faces—and dead center may not be the most important part of the photo. The cool thing is that you can tap somewhere else in the scene to move that yellow square—to recalculate the focus, exposure, and white balance.

Here’s when you might want to do this tapping:

• When the whole image looks too dark or too bright. If you tap a dark part of the scene, the photo brightens up; if you tap a bright part, it darkens a bit. You’re telling the camera, “Redo your calculations so this part has the best exposure; I don’t care if the rest of the picture gets brighter or darker.” At that point, you can override the phone’s exposure decision.

  

• When the scene has a color cast. If the photo looks, for example, a little bluish or yellowish, tap a different spot—the one you care most about. The iPhone recomputes its assessment of the white balance.

• When you’re in macro mode. If the foreground object is very close to the lens—4 to 8 inches away—the iPhone automatically goes into macro (super-closeup) mode. In this mode, you can do something really cool: You can defocus the background. The background goes soft, slightly blurry, just like the professional photos you see in magazines. No, not as well or as flexibly as in Portrait mode (“Editing Live Photos”), but it’s something. Just make sure you tap the foreground object.

Adjust Exposure

When you tap the screen to set the focus point, a new control appears: a little yellow sun slider. That’s your exposure control. Slide it up to brighten the whole photo or down to make things darker. Often, just a small adjustment is all it takes to add a splash of light to a dim scene, or to dial the details back into a photo that’s bright white.

To reset the slider to the iPhone’s original proposed setting, tap somewhere else, or just aim the phone at something different for a second.

The point is that the Camera app lets you fuss with the focus point and the exposure level independently.

Focus Lock/Exposure Lock

The iPhone likes to focus and calculate the exposure before it shoots. Cameras are funny that way.

That tendency, however, can get in your way when you’re shooting something that moves fast. Horse races, divers. Pets. Kids on merry-go-rounds, kids on slides, kids eating breakfast. By the time the camera has calculated the focus and exposure, which takes about a second, you’ve lost the shot.

Therefore, Apple provides a feature that’s common on professional cameras: auto-exposure lock and autofocus lock. They let you set up the focus and exposure in advance so that there’s zero lag when you finally snap the shot.

To use this feature, point the camera at something that has the same distance and lighting as the subject-to-be. For example, focus at the base of the merry-go-round, directly below where your daughter’s horse will be. Or point at the bottom of the waterslide before your son is ready to go.

Now hold your finger down on that spot on the iPhone’s screen until you see the yellow square blink twice. When you lift your finger, the phrase “AE/AF Lock” tells you that you’ve now locked in exposure and autofocus. (You can tap again to unlock it if you change your mind.)

At this point, you can drag the yellow sun slider to adjust that locked exposure, if you like.

Now you can snap photos, rapid-fire, without ever having to wait while your iPhone rethinks focus and exposure.

The LED Flash

As on most phones, the iPhone’s “flash” is actually just a very bright LED light on the back. You can make it turn on momentarily, providing a small boost of illumination when the lights are low. (That’s a small boost—it won’t do anything for subjects more than a few feet away.)

The iPhone 5s, 6, and 6s models, in fact, have two LED flashes: one white, one amber. The 7 and later models take that a step further, with four flashes, together producing 50 percent more light output.

The flashes go off simultaneously, with their strengths mixed so that their light matches the color temperature of the scene. (You might notice that the phone flashes once before it captures the shot. That’s the camera’s opportunity to measure the light color of the scene.)

This multi-flash trick makes a huge difference in the quality of your flash photos. Especially in skin tones, which may be why Apple calls the feature “True Tone.” Here’s the before and after:

To adjust the flash’s behavior, tap the in the upper-left corner of the screen. You can choose On (the flash will fire no matter what the lighting conditions), Off (the flash won’t fire), or Auto. That means the flash will turn on automatically when, in the iPhone’s opinion, the scene is too dark. In all cases, you get a warning if the flash will go off for the next shot: a in a yellow box above the preview.

The Screen Flash

The iPhone 6s and later models offer a “flash” on the front, too, for taking selfies. But it’s not an LED like the one on the back.

Instead, at the moment you take the shot, the screen lights up to illuminate your face. Better yet: It adjusts the color of the screen’s “flash” to give your face the best flesh tones, based on a check of the ambient light color.

Of course, the normal iPhone screen is too tiny to supply much light, even at full brightness. So Apple developed a custom chip with a single purpose: to overclock the screen. In selfie situations, the screen blasts at three times its usual full brightness for a fraction of a second. It is crazy bright.

It works fantastically well. Here you can see the nuked-looking result from a traditional back LED “flash” (left) side-by-side with the more nuanced screen flash (right).

Zooming In

The iPhone has a zoom, which can bring you “closer” to the subject—but (unless it’s a 7 Plus, 8 Plus, X, or XS) it’s a digital zoom. It doesn’t work like a real camera’s optical zoom, which actually moves lenses to blow up the scene. Instead, it basically just blows up the image, making everything bigger, and slightly degrading the picture quality in the process.

To zoom in like this, spread two fingers on the screen. As you spread, a zoom slider appears; you can also drag the handle in the slider, or tap + or -, for more precise zooming.

Sometimes, getting closer to the action is worth the subtle image-quality sacrifice.

True Optical Zoom

On the iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, X, and XS, there was enough room for Apple to install two lenses, right next to each other. One is wide-angle; one is telephoto. With one tap on the little 1x button (below, left), you can zoom in 2x (middle). This is true optical zoom, not the cruddy digital zoom on most previous phones.

2x zoom isn’t a huge amount, but it’s 2x more than any other thin smartphone can handle. And it’s a triumphant first step toward eliminating a key drawback of phone cameras: They can’t actually zoom.

You can also dial up any amount of zoom between 1x and 2x, again without losing any quality. The iPhone performs that stunt by seamlessly combining the zoom lens’s image (in the center of the photo) with a margin provided by the wide lens. Just plant your finger on the 1x and drag it to the left. You’ll see the circular scale of zooming appear (previous page, right).

You can even zoom while shooting a video, which is very cool.

Even on these phones, by the way, you can keep dragging your finger to the left, past 2x—all the way up to a really blotchy 10x (or 6x for video). Beyond 2x, of course, you’re invoking digital zoom. But sometimes it’s just what you need.

The “Rule of Thirds” Grid

The Rule of Thirds, long held as gospel by painters and photographers, suggests that you imagine a tic-tac-toe grid superimposed on your frame. As you frame the shot, position the important parts of the photo on those lines or, better yet, at their intersections. Supposedly, this setup creates a stronger composition than putting everything in dead center.

Now, it’s really a Consideration of Thirds; plenty of photographs are, in fact, strongest when the subject is centered.

But if you want to know where those magic intersections are, duck into Settings → Camera. Turn on Grid. Now the phone displays the tic-tac-toe grid, for your composition pleasure (it’s not part of the photo). You turn it off the same way.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

In one regard, digital cameras are still pathetic: Compared with the human eye, they have terrible dynamic range.

That’s the range from the brightest to darkest spots in a single scene. If you photograph someone standing in front of a bright window, you’ll just get a black silhouette. The camera doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle both the bright background and the person in front of it.

You could brighten up the exposure so that the person’s face is lit—but then you’d brighten the background to a nuclear-white rectangle.

A partial solution: HDR (high dynamic range) photography. That’s when the camera takes three (or even more) photos—one each at dark, medium, and light exposure settings. Its software combines the best parts of all three, bringing details to both the shadows and the highlights.

Your iPhone has a built-in HDR feature. It’s not as amazing as what an HDR guru can do in Photoshop—for one thing, you have zero control over how the images are combined. But, often, an HDR photo does show more detail in both bright and dark areas than a regular shot would. In this shot (left), the sky is blown out—pure white. On the right, the HDR feature brings back the streaks of color.

In many earlier iOS versions, you had to choose when to use HDR, using the HDR button in the Camera app. It produced three choices: On, Off, and Auto. (Auto means “Use your judgment, iPhone. If you think this scene would benefit, then please use HDR automatically.”)

Nowadays, Apple thinks its HDR smarts are good enough that you’ll always get the best results with Auto. In other words, the Camera always uses HDR when it thinks it’s necessary.

If you miss having manual control, though, all is not lost: Open Settings → Camera and turn off Auto HDR.

When you inspect your photos later in the Photos app, you’ll know which ones were taken with HDR turned on; when you tap the photo, you’ll see a tiny HDR logo in the upper-left corner.

Taking the Shot

All right. You’ve opened the Camera app. You’ve set up the focus, exposure, flash, grid, HDR, and zoom. If, in fact, your subject hasn’t already left the scene, you can now take the picture. You can do that in any of three ways:

• Tap the shutter button ().

• Press either of the physical volume buttons on the left edge of the phone.

  This option is fantastic. If you hold the phone with the volume buttons at the top, they’re right where the shutter would be on a real camera. Pressing one feels more natural than—and doesn’t shake the camera as much as—tapping the screen.

• Press a volume button on your earbuds clicker—a great way to trigger the shutter without jiggling the phone at all, and a more convenient way to take selfies when the phone is at arm’s length.

Either way, if the phone isn’t muted, you hear the snap! sound of a picture successfully taken.

You get to admire your work for only about half a second—and then the photo slurps itself into the thumbnail icon at the lower-left corner of the screen. To review the photo you just took, tap that thumbnail icon.

At this point, to look at other pictures you’ve taken, tap the screen and then tap All Photos.

This is your opportunity to choose a photo (or many) for emailing, texting, posting to Facebook, and so on; tap Select, tap the photos you want, and then tap the Share button (). See “The Share Sheet”.

Burst Mode

The iPhone snaps many photos—10 shots a second—if you keep your finger pressed on the button or a volume key. That’s a fantastic feature when you’re trying to capture a moment that will be over in a flash: a golf swing, a pet trick, a toddler sitting still.

As you press the or the volume key, a counter rapidly ticks off how many shots you’ve fired.

Better yet, the phone helps you clean up the mess afterward—the hassle of inspecting all 130 photos you shot, to find the ones worth keeping.

Tap the lower-left thumbnail. To keep you sane, the iPhone depicts your burst as a single photo, with the phrase “Burst (72 photos)” (or whatever) in the corner of the screen. (Its thumbnail bears multiple frames, as though it were a stack of slides.)

Here’s where it gets cool. If you tap Select, you see all frames of the burst in a horizontally scrolling row. Underneath, you see an even smaller “filmstrip” of them—and a few are marked with dots.

These are the ones the iPhone has decided are the keepers. It does that by studying the clarity or blur of each shot, examining how much one frame is different from those around it, and even skipping past shots where somebody’s eyes are closed. Tap the marked thumbnails to see if you approve of the iPhone’s selections.

Whether you do or not, you should work through the larger thumbnails in the burst, tapping each one you want to keep. (The circle in the corner sprouts a blue checkmark.)

When you tap Done, the phone asks: “Would you like to keep the other photos in this burst?” Tap Keep Everything to preserve all the shots in the burst, so you can return later to extract a different set of frames; tap Keep Only 2 Favorites (or whatever number you selected) to discard the ones you skipped.

Self-Portraits (the Front Camera)

The iPhone has a second camera on the front, above the screen. It lets you use the screen itself as a viewfinder to frame yourself, experiment with your expression, and check your teeth.

To activate the front camera, tap the . Suddenly, you see yourself on the screen. Frame the shot, and then tap to take the photo.

Now, the front camera is not the back camera. It’s OK on the 6s and later models (5 megapixels, plus that cool screen flash)—but older models offer lower resolution, lower quality, and no flash.

But when your goal is a well-framed selfie that you’ll use on the screen—email or the web, for example, where resolution isn’t very important—then having the front-camera option is better than not having it.

The Self-Timer

A self-timer is essential when you want to be in the picture yourself; you can prop the phone on something and then run into the scene. It’s also a great way to prevent camera shake (which produces blurry photos), because your finger doesn’t touch the phone. Just tap the , and then 3s (a 3-second countdown) or 10s (10 seconds).

Now, when you tap or press a volume key, you get a countdown: huge digits on the screen if you’re using the front camera, a blinking flash if you’re using the rear camera. After the countdown, the phone takes the picture all by itself. (If the sound is on, you’ll hear the shutter noise.)

Correction: In its regular, non-Live modes, the phone takes 10 pictures, in burst mode. The phone assumes that if you’re using the self-timer, then you won’t be able to see when everybody’s eyes are open. So it takes 10 shots in a row; you can weed through them later to find the best one.

Filters

The success of Instagram made it clear to Apple that the masses want filters, special effects that tweak the color of your photo in artsy ways. You, too, can make your pictures look old, washed-out, or oversaturated. In fact, you have nine options at your disposal.

• To filter before you shoot. Tap to view your options (next page, left). You see a scrolling strip of color and black-and-white filters. The first one always represents “no filter.”

  

  Tap a filter thumbnail to try it. Each turns your photo into a variation of black-and-white or plays with its saturation (color intensity), as shown above at right. When you’ve decided, take the shot as usual. (To turn off the filters, tap again, and then select the Original tile.)

• To filter after you shoot. You can also apply a filter to any photo you’ve already taken (above, right); see “Filters ()”.

Reviewing Live Photos

As you flick through the photos in the Photos app, you’ll know when a photo is a Live Photo; you’ll see it animate for a half-second.

To play the full three-second video with sound, hard-press or long-press it with your finger. (See “Flick” for more on force-touching.)

Editing Live Photos

You can edit Live Photos in all kinds of interesting ways—both as photos and as little videos. See “Editing Live Photos”.

Sharing Live Photos

What happens if you try to send a Live Photo to some other device? Well, first of all, you’ll know that you’re about to share a Live Photo. After you tap , a special icon reminds you.

You can tap to turn off that logo before you send, so that you’re sharing only the still photo.

If you proceed with Live Photos turned on, what happens next depends on what kind of device receives it.

If it’s running recent Apple software (iOS 9 or later, OS X El Capitan or later), then the Live Photo plays on that gadget, too. On the Mac, in Photos, click Live Photo to play it. On an iPad or older iPhone, hold your finger down on it to play it back.

What if it’s a device or software program that doesn’t know about Live Photos—if you send it as a text message, for example, or open it in Photoshop? Behind the scenes, a Live Photo has two elements: a 12-megapixel JPEG still image and a three-second QuickTime movie. In these situations, only the JPEG image arrives at the other end.

Adjusting the Blur

The iPhone XS and XS Max take the blurry-background concept even further. First, Apple has greatly refined the bokeh (photographer-speak for the character of the blur), so it looks more like it came from a big pro camera.

Second, you can dial in how much blur you get, either before or after taking the shot. This feature is super-useful, especially when the phone’s instinct is to blur out a detail that you’d rather remain sharp (like a companion in your group).

To view the Depth (blur) slider before you take the shot, tap the tiny at top right; to view it later, in Photos, tap Edit. Neither adjustment is permanent; you can increase or decrease the blur months or years later, without ever affecting the quality of the photo.

This phone’s photos are getting scarily close to looking like professional ones.

Studio Lighting

On the iPhone 8 Plus and X-class models, a further refinement to Portrait mode awaits, something Apple calls studio lighting. It’s a set of five lighting effects that scroll by as though on a disc. Natural Light is the original shot. Studio Light brightens your subjects as though they were lit from the front with pro studio lighting (below, left). Contour Light deepens shadows (middle). Stage Light, incredibly, cuts out the background, making it black. And Studio Light Mono does the same, but in black-and-white (right).

You can try these lighting modes out either before you snap or after (in Photos, when you tap Edit).

A Note About Resolution—and 4K Video

Video generally plays back at 30 frames a second. But the iPhone 6 and later can do something only expensive cameras do: They can record and play back 60 frames a second. Video you shoot this way has a smoothness and clarity that’s almost surreal. (It also takes up twice as much space on your phone.)

You choose the video quality you want in Settings → Camera → Record Video. Experiment with 60 fps; see if you feel the result is worth the sacrifice of storage space.

This is also, by the way, where you turn on 4K video recording on the 6s and later models. 4K televisions, also called Ultra HD, are TV sets with four times as many tiny pixels as an HDTV set, for four times the clarity.

4K shooting is not the factory setting, and that’s a good thing; 4K takes up a huge amount of storage space (375 megabytes a minute).

Furthermore, you probably don’t have anywhere to play back 4K video you’ve captured with this phone! Paradoxically, the iPhone itself (even the 2688 × 1242 pixel iPhone XS Max) doesn’t have enough pixels to play 4K video. To see the difference, you need a big 4K television or 4K computer screen, and you have to sit very close.

(You can post 4K video to YouTube—but even then, few people have computer screens capable of playing it back in 4K.)

Things to Do While You’re Rolling

Once you’ve begun capturing video, don’t think your work is done. You can have all kinds of fun during the recording. For example:

• Change focus. You can change focus while you’re filming, which is great when you’re panning from a nearby object to a distant one. Refocusing is automatic, just as it is on camcorders. But you can also force a refocusing (for example, when the phone is focusing on the wrong thing) by tapping to specify a new focus point. The iPhone recalculates the focus, white balance, and exposure at that point, just as it does when you’re taking stills.

• Change exposure. While you’re recording, you can drag your finger up or down to make the scene brighter or dimmer.

• Zoom in. You can zoom in while you’re rolling, up to 3x actual size. Just spread two fingers on the screen, like you would to magnify a photo. Pinch two fingers to zoom out again. (On the iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, or X-class, you can either do that two-finger spreading or drag the little 1x button to the left, as described in “The “Rule of Thirds” Grid”.)

  Tip

  Once you start to zoom, a zoom slider appears on the screen. It’s much easier to zoom smoothly by dragging its handle than it is to use a two-finger pinch or spread.

  So here’s a smart idea: Zoom in slightly before you start recording, so that the zoom slider appears on the screen. Then, during the shot, drag its handle to zoom in, as smoothly as you like.

• Take a still photo. Yes, you can even snap still photos while you’re capturing video. Just tap the that appears while you’re filming. Awesome.

When you’re finished recording, tap Stop (). The iPhone stops recording and plays a chime; it’s ready to record another shot.

There’s no easier-to-use camcorder on earth. And what a lot of capacity! Each individual shot can be an hour long—and on the 512-gigabyte iPhones, you can record 272 hours of video. Just long enough to capture the entire elementary-school talent show.

The Front Camera

You can film yourself, too. Just tap before you film to make the iPhone use its front-mounted camera, so that the screen shows you. The resolution isn’t as high (the video isn’t as sharp) as what the back camera captures, but it’s still high definition.

The Video Light

You know the LED “flash” on the back of the phone? You can use it as a video light, too, supplying some illumination to subjects within about 5 feet or so. Just tap the icon and then tap On before you start capturing. (Alas, you have to turn the light on before you start rolling. You can’t turn it on or off in the middle of a shot.)

iMovie for iPhone

Of course, there’s more to editing than just snipping dead air from the ends of a clip. That’s why Apple made iMovie for iPhone. It’s free on a new iPhone or $5 if it didn’t come with your phone.

The Photos Tab

At the bottom of the Photos app screen, four tabs lie in wait: Photos, For You, Albums, and Search. On the Photos tab, iOS groups your photos intelligently into sets that are easy to navigate. Here they are, from smallest to largest:

• Moments. A Moment is a group of photos you took in one place at one time—for example, all the shots at the picnic by the lake. The phone even uses its GPS to give each Moment a name: “San Francisco, California (Union Square),” for example.

  Tip

  If you tap the name of a Year, Collection, or Moment, you get a details page that includes a ready-to-play Memory (“Memories”) and a map, showing exactly where these pictures were taken. Slick!

• Collections. Put a bunch of Moments together, and what do you get? A Collection. Here again, the phone tries to study the times and places of your photo taking—but this time it puts them into groups that might span a few days and several locations. You might discover that your entire spring vacation is a single Collection, for example.

  

• Years. If you “zoom out” of your photos far enough, you wind up viewing them by year: 2016, 2017, 2018, and so on.

And now, the tipfest for these three organizational structures:

• In iOS 12, Moments, Collections, and Years are no longer labeled “Moments,” “Collections,” and “Years” at the top of the screen; it always says Photos. In its heart, though, Photos is still thinking of them as Moments, Collections, and Years.

• To “zoom in” from larger groupings to smaller ones, just tap each pile of thumbnails. If you tap a thumbnail on the Moments screen, you open that photo for viewing.

• To “zoom out” again, tap the grouping name at top left (2018, for example).

• If you’ve opened a single photo for examination, you can retreat to the Moment it came from by pinching with two fingers.

• Whenever you’re looking at a grid of tiny thumbnail images (in a Year or a Collection, say), hold your finger lightly down within the batch. A larger thumbnail sprouts from your finger. At this point, you can slide your finger around within the mosaic to find a particular photo, or a batch of them.

  And if you press harder (on a 3D Touch phone), you get a larger peek, and then pop, of its image (“Peek and Pop”).

Flicking, Rotating, Zooming, Panning

Once a photo is open at full size, you have your chance to perform the four most famous and dazzling tricks of the iPhone: flicking, rotating, zooming, and panning a photo.

• Flicking horizontally is how you advance to the next/previous picture or movie in the batch.

• Zooming a photo means magnifying it, and it’s a blast. One quick way is to double-tap the photo; the iPhone zooms in on the portion you tapped, doubling its size.

  Another technique is to use the two-finger spread, which gives you more control over what gets magnified and by how much.

  Once you’ve spread a photo bigger, you can then pinch to scale it down again. Or just double-tap to restore the original size. (You don’t have to restore a photo to original size before advancing to the next one, though; if you flick enough times, you’ll pull the next photo onto the screen.)

• Panning is moving a photo around on the screen after you’ve zoomed in. Just drag your finger to do that; no scroll bars are necessary.

• Rotating is what you do when a horizontal photo or video appears on the upright iPhone, which makes the photo look small and fills most of the screen with blackness.

  Just turn the iPhone 90 degrees in either direction. Like magic, the photo rotates and enlarges to fill its new, wider canvas. No taps required. (This doesn’t work when the phone is flat on its back—on a table, for example. It has to be more or less upright. It also doesn’t work when portrait orientation is locked.)

  This trick also works the other way: You can make a vertical photo fit better by turning the iPhone upright.

  When the iPhone is rotated, all the controls and gestures reorient themselves. For example, flicking right to left still brings on the next photo, even if you’re now holding the iPhone the wide way.

Hide a Photo

Here’s a quirky little feature: It’s possible to hide a photo from the Photos tab so that it appears only in a special Hidden folder.

Apple noticed that lots of people use their phones to take screenshots of apps, pictures of whiteboards or diagrams, shots of package labels or parking-garage signs, and so on. These images aren’t scenic or lovely; they’re not memories; you don’t want a slideshow of them; they don’t look good (or serve much purpose) when they appear nestled in with your shots-to-remember.

Open the photo and then tap ; in the Sharing options that appear, tap Hide. To confirm, tap Hide Photo.

Whatever photos you hide go to the Hidden folder on the Albums tab, so you can find them easily. From here, you can unhide a shot the same way: Hit and then Unhide.

Deleting Photos

If some photo no longer meets your exacting standards, you can delete it. But this action is trickier than you may think.

• If you took the picture using the iPhone, no sweat. Open the photo; tap . When you tap Delete Photo, that picture is gone. Or, rather, it’s moved to the Recently Deleted folder described in ???; you have 30 days to change your mind.

  (If you open the photo from the Albums tab instead, you’re just taking the picture out of that album—not actually deleting it from the phone.)

• If the photo was synced to the iPhone from your computer, well, that’s life. The iPhone remains a mirror of what’s on the computer. In other words, you can’t delete the photo from the phone. Instead, delete it from the original album on your computer (which does not mean deleting it from the computer altogether). The next time you sync the iPhone, the photo disappears from it, too.

  The exception: If you use iCloud Photos (“iCloud Photos”), you’re warned that you’re about to delete the photo from all your devices—and that’s what happens.

Photo Controls

When you first open a photo, some useful controls appear, in blue against the white background (below, left). They show up either at the top or bottom of the screen, depending on how you’re holding the phone. (Tap the photo to hide them and summon a black background, for a more impressive photo presentation.)

• Date. The top of the screen says “September 13,” for example, letting you know when this photo was taken.

• Edit. This button is the gateway to the iPhone’s photo-editing features, described starting in “Creating and Deleting Albums”.

• Favorite (). When you find a picture you love—enough that you might want to call it up later to show people—tap . This photo or video now appears in the Favorites folder (in the Albums tab of the Photos app), so that it’s easy to find with your other prize-winners. (The appears only on photos you’ve taken with the phone—not pictures you’ve imported from computers or other cameras.)

  

• Share (). Tap if you want to do something more with this photo than just stare at it. You can use it as your iPhone’s wallpaper, print it, copy it, text it, send it by email, use it as somebody’s headshot in your Contacts list, post it on Twitter or Facebook, and so on. These options are all described starting in “Handing Off to Other Editing Apps”.

• Delete ( ). Gets rid of this photo, as described earlier.

• Related photos. There’s one more huge element of the photo screen that you might miss. To see it, drag upward. Here’s a vast, scrolling screen that explodes with resources for this photo, like a map of where it was taken (and the address); links to “related” shots (taken in the same place, or of the same people); and even a Show Photos from This Day link, which calls up all the other pictures you took that day.

The New, Improved Search

There’s a search tab () in Photos, which might seem odd. How can you search for a blob of pixels? How does the phone know what’s in a picture?

Artificial intelligence, people. Apple has given Photos the ability to recognize what’s in your pictures and videos. You can search your photos for “dog,” or “beach,” or whatever. In iOS 12, in fact, you can combine search terms (so you can find pictures of dogs on beaches), and you can search by who’s in the pictures, what the event was (concerts, festivals), by month or season or year, by business or museum, and so on.

To try it out, tap . Right off the bat, the phone offers some one-tap canned searches based on dates (like One Year Ago and Fall), people’s faces, locations (like Massachusetts and San Francisco Airport), categories (like Animals, Sports, and Performances). Tap to see the photos and videos that match.

To search for something more specific, you can type things like these:

• Place or event names. Tucson, bay area, detroit, daleford road, sundance film festival, superbowl, home, lincoln high school, museum…

• Times. Last year, 2018, summer, night, morning, last week, march 2016, yesterday…

• People. Casey, dad, me, Sherwood Atkinson…

• Captions or album names. Chess club, corp offsite, robin’s first jalapeño, mom bday…

• Nouns. Forest, girl, plane, piano, fence, field, food truck, restaurant, party, citrus fruit, storefront, pizza, graffiti, money, mountain, cats, skiing, hat, dancing, music…

As you type, Photos builds a list of search terms it thinks you might intend. (If you’ve typed Fi, it might list Fish, Fish Tank, Fig Tree, and so on.) Each one bears a number—that’s how many pictures Photos has found that match that term.

You can tap one of these autocomplete terms to see, instantly, all the matching photos. (The best matches appear in clusters: photo thumbnails, Moments, Albums, Dates, Memories. To see all the matching photos, tap See All.)

But here’s where things get crazy: You can combine search terms. The instant you tap one of the search results, you’re offered two ways to refine your search:

• The search-results list now changes to reveal subcategories. If you just searched for 2015, for example, the options may now include Fall, Winter, United States, Sports, Mom, and anything else Photos considers important from 2015.

• The result you tapped becomes a token in the search box—a gray rectangle with an icon (a little calendar representing a time period, for example). In the example on the facing page, if you tap Adult Cats in the first results list (top left), that term becomes a token (top right).

  The results list now offers subcategories within that token. In the example, suppose you tap Summer as the time period (top right). Now Summer becomes a token (middle left). You can now tap one of its category results, creating a third token (middle right), and so on.

  By the time you’re finished, the tokens might include Adult Cats Summer Lafayette—the perfect way to pull up that hilarious picture you remember taken of your kittens sprawled at the Lafayette house that one July—in a year you can’t remember.

As you’ll soon discover, Apple’s image recognition software is pretty amazing. It makes occasional mistakes—you may find a truck in your Cars category or something—but in general, it’s an amazing way to find a pixel in a haystack.

Memories

What Apple calls Memories are automatically selected groups of pix and videos from certain time periods or trips, which, with a tap, become gorgeous, musical slideshows. Most people are pleasantly surprised at how coherent and well-created these are, even though they’re totally automated. Photos, short pieces of your videos, and even scrolling panoramas are all first-class citizens in these slideshows.

Tap the For You tab to see the ones Photos has come up with so far.

Right off the bat, you see a few of Photos’ suggestions, represented as labeled billboards (“Cape Cod Summer,” “Best of Last Week,” “Casey and Me”…). Tap to open a Memory; at this point, you can scroll down to see more about what’s in it. You’ll see the photos that will be in it, as well as who’s in it (People), and where the photos came from (Places).

At the very top, the button offers options like Share Photos (uses the same sharing mechanism described in “The Share Sheet”—even suggests, as sharees, people it recognizes in the photos); Delete Memory; and Add to Favorite Memories (adds this slideshow to a new folder on the Albums tab called Favorite Memories, for quick access later).

Anyway, the real fun begins when you tap to start an instant slideshow, with music, with photos changing to the beat. They’re usually fantastic.

When you come back to your senses, note that you can tap the screen for some quick editing options. Drag horizontally to change the animation/music style (Dreamy, Sentimental, Gentle, Chill, and so on) or the slideshow length (Short, Medium, Long).

For more detailed editing, tap Edit. Now you can edit the Memory’s Title (name and its typographical style—below, right), Music (either the app’s selections or anything from your music library), Duration (dial up any length you want), or Photos & Videos (tap n to add one, to delete one).

Once you’ve got a really killer Memory on your hands, by the way, don’t miss the option to send it to other people as a standalone video. While a Memory slideshow is playing, tap it to reveal the button at the bottom.

Featured Photos

While you’re on the For You tab, you may wonder about the row of pictures called Featured Photos.

Apple is coy about which photos show up in this row, other than to say that its AI considers them your “best photos.” They’re usually in focus and well lit, and occasionally you’ll see one that was taken “On This Day” in an earlier year. Think of it as Photos’ version of the Facebook feature that digs up old photos it thinks you might like to be reminded of.

Effects Suggestions

You may also see, on the For You tab, photos that Photos, in all its modesty, thinks could be improved with one of its effects. If you take a lot of Live Photos (“Live Photos”), that may mean applying one of those effects (Loop, Bounce, Long Exposure—see “Editing Live Photos”). If you’ve taken some Portrait-mode shots, you may see a proposal to add one of the studio-lighting effects (“Adjusting the Blur”).

The Albums Tab

The third tab of your Photos app, Albums, presents another set of roads into your photo collection. Its primary headings are these:

• My Albums. Here you get a list of albums you’ve created (or copied to the phone from your Mac or PC). The first one is always All Photos—everything on your phone, including videos. (If you’re not using iCloud Photos or My Photo Stream, it’s called Camera Roll instead.)

  

• Shared Albums lists the most recent clusters of pictures you’ve electronically shared with other people. Each thumbnail displays the names and photos of the actual people you’ve sent them to. Hit See All to open a screen that shows them all.

• People & Places. Impressively enough, Photos can auto-group your photos according to which people are in them (using facial recognition) and the places where you shot them (using GPS). You get one icon here for People, and one for Places.

  People: Once you’ve given the software a running start, it can find those people in the rest of your photo collection automatically. That’s handy every now and then—when you need several photos of your kid for a school project, for example.

  

  On the People screen, you get thumbnails representing the faces Photos has found and grouped, complete with a tally of how many photos Photos has found. At the top, you see people you’ve designated as favorites (previous page, left)

  Tap a thumbnail to see all the photos of this person (previous page, right). If you see “There are additional photos for review” at the top, tap Review; Photos shows you other photos it thinks are this person (below). Select the ones it got right, and then hit Done; hit Add Name to name this person (if you haven’t already), so Photos will more correctly identify him or her from now on.

  Tip

  If Photos has created two “people” icons for the same person, here’s how to fix it. Tap one of their thumbnails to open it; tap Select; tap each duplicate, and then hit Merge.

  

  If there’s a photographed someone in your life whom Photos doesn’t offer on the People screen, by all means add that person yourself. Open the photo, swipe up to see a tiny round headshot of each person in it, tap the person, tap Add Name, enter the name, tap Next, and then tap Done.

  And if there’s someone that Photos is misidentifying—Aunt Gertie wound up classified as an Uncle Eugene—you can fix her, although you’ll have to tap this sequence very carefully:

  In the People album, tap the Uncle Eugene thumbnail. Tap Show more → Select → Show Faces and select each misidentified face. Then tap to open the Share sheet, and finally tap Not This Person.

  Tip

  That weird Share-sheet method is also how you choose a different key photo—the one headshot that represents this person on the main People screen. In the People album, tap the person’s tile, and then tap Select. Tap the preferred photo, and then tap to open the Share sheet, and finally tap Make Key Photo.

  Places: Every photo you take with a smartphone (and a few very fancy cameras) gets geotagged—stamped, behind the scenes, with its geographic coordinates. When you tap Places, you see a map, dotted with clusters of photos you took in each place. Tap one to see the photos you took there.

• Media Types. As a convenience to you, these categories give you one-tap shopping for everything you’ve captured using the Camera app’s specialized picture and video modes: Videos, Selfies, Live Photos, Portrait (if you have a Plus or X-class phone), Long Exposure, Panoramas, Time-Lapse, Slo-Mo, Bursts, Screenshots, and Animated. (Long Exposure and Animated are Live Photos to which you’ve applied the effects described in ???.)

  Super-handy when you’re trying to show someone your latest time-lapse masterpiece, for example; now you know where to look for it.

• Imports. This “album” is incredibly useful, if you can remember it even exists. It lists all the photos you’ve taken with other cameras—actual cameras, or drones, or GoPros, and so on—that you imported into the iPhone, a Mac, or any other Apple gadget associated with your iCloud account.

• Hidden. Here are photos you’ve hidden, as described in “Hide a Photo”.

• Favorites. This folder gives you quick access to your favorite photos. And how does the phone know which photos are your favorites? Easy: You’ve told it. You’ve tapped the icon under a photo, anywhere within the Photos app. (Favorites must be photos you’ve taken with the phone, not ones transferred from your computer.)

• Recently Deleted. Even after you think you’ve deleted a photo or video from your phone, you have 30 days to change your mind. Deleted pictures and videos sit in this folder, quietly counting down to their own doomsdays.

  If you wind up changing your mind, you can open Recently Deleted, tap the photo you’d condemned, and tap Recover. It pops back into its rightful place in the Photos app, saved from termination.

  On the other hand, you can also zap a photo into oblivion immediately. Tap to open one of your recently deleted photos, tap Delete, and then confirm with Delete Photo. If you tap Select, you can also hit Delete All or Recover All.

As you’d guess, you can drill down from any of these groupings to a screen full of thumbnails, and from there to an individual photo.

Creating and Deleting Albums

You can manually add selected photos into new albums—a great way to organize a huge batch you’ve shot on vacation, for example.

To do that, open any one of your existing albums (including All Photos or Camera Roll); tap Select; and then tap (or drag through) all the photos you want to move to a new or different album. Tap Add To at the bottom of the screen.

You’re now offered an Add to Album screen. Tap the album into which you want to move these pictures. (The canned specialty-photo folders, like Panorama and Time-Lapse, are also dimmed, because only iOS can put things into those folders, and it does that automatically.)

This list also includes a New Album button; you’re asked to type the name you want for the new album and then tap Save.

To delete an album you created on the phone, start on the main Albums tab. Tap See All, then Edit, and then tap the button on the album you want to delete.

Auto-Enhance ()

When you tap this magical button, the iPhone analyzes the relative brightness of all the pixels in your photo and attempts to “balance” it. After a moment, the app adjusts the brightness and contrast and intensifies dull or grayish-looking areas. Usually, the pictures look richer and more vivid as a result.

You may find that Auto-Enhance has little effect on some photos, only minimally improves others, and totally rescues a few. In any case, if you don’t care for the result, you can tap the button again to turn Auto-Enhance off.

Adjust Color ()

The people have spoken: They want control over color, white balance, tint, and so on.

So when you tap , you’re offered three adjustment categories: Light, Color, and B&W.

When you tap one of these categories, you see a “filmstrip” below or beside your photo. You can drag your finger across it, watching the effect on your photo.

As it turns out, each of these sliders controls a handful of variables, all of which it’s changing simultaneously. For example, adjusting the Light slider affects the exposure, contrast, brights, and darks all at once (next page, left).

Intriguingly, you can tap or to see how the master slider has affected these qualities—or even adjust these sub-sliders yourself (above, right). For example:

• Light. When you drag your finger along the Light filmstrip, you’re adjusting the exposure and contrast of the photo. Often, a slight tweak is all it takes to bring a lot more detail out of the shot.

  For much finer control, tap the or icon. You open your “drawer” of additional controls: Brilliance (a slider that, Apple says, “brightens dark areas and pulls in highlights to reveal hidden detail”), Exposure (adjusts the brightness of all pixels), Highlights (pulls lost details out of very bright areas), Shadows (pulls lost details out of very dark areas), Brightness (like Exposure, but doesn’t brighten parts that are already bright), Contrast (heightens the difference between the brightest and darkest areas), and Black Point (determines what is “black,” shifting the entire dark/light range upward or downward). Once again, you drag your finger along the “filmstrip” to watch the effect on your photo.

• Color. The Color filmstrip adjusts the tint and intensity of the photos’ colors. Here again, just a nudge can sometimes liven a dull photo or make blue skies “pop” a little more.

  Tap or to see the three sliders that make up the master Color control. They are Saturation (intensity of the colors—from vivid fake-looking Disney all the way down to black and white), Contrast (deepens the most saturated colors), and Cast (adjusts the color tint of the photo, making it warmer or cooler overall).

  

• B&W stands for black and white. The instant you touch this filmstrip, your photo goes monochrome, like a black-and-white photo. It’s hard to describe exactly what happens when you drag your finger—you just have to try it—except to note that the app plays with the relative tones of blacks, grays, and whites, creating variations on the black-and-white theme.

  Tap or to see the component sliders: Intensity (the strength of the lightening/darkening effect), Neutrals (brightness of the middle grays), Tone (intensifies the brightest and darkest areas), and Grain (simulates the “grain”—the texture—of film prints; the farther you move the slider, the higher the “speed of the film” and the more visible the grain).

At any point, you can back out of what you’re doing by tapping . For example, if you’re fiddling with one of the Color sub-sliders (Contrast or Saturation, for example), tapping returns you to the view of the three master sliders (Light, Color, and B&W).

And, of course, you can tap Cancel to abandon your editing altogether, or Done to save the edited photo and close the editing controls.

It might seem a little silly trying to perform these Photoshop-like tweaks on a tiny phone screen, but the power is here if you need it.

Filters ()

Filters are effects that make a photo black and white, oversaturated, or washed out. As noted in “Live Photos”, you can apply a filter either as you take the picture or afterward.

Tap to view a scrolling row of filter buttons. Tap each to see what it looks like on your photo; finish up by tapping Done or Cancel.

(Don’t these filters more or less duplicate the effects of the Light, Color, and B&W sliders described already? Yes. But filters produce canned, one-tap, instant changes that don’t require as much tweaking.)

Remove Red Eye ()

Red eye—devilish, glowing-red pupils in your subjects’ eyes—has ruined many an otherwise great photo.

Red eye is caused when the light of your flash illuminates the blood-red retinal tissue at the back of the eyes. That’s why red-eye problems are worse when you shoot pictures in a dim room: Your subjects’ pupils are dilated, allowing even more light from your flash to reach their retinas.

When you tap this button, a message says, “Tap each red-eye.” Do what it says: Tap with your finger inside each eye that has the problem. A little white ring appears around the pupil (unless you missed, in which case the ring shudders side to side, as though saying “nope”)—and the app turns the red in each eye to black.

Crop/Straighten ()

This button opens a crazy editing screen where you can adjust the size, shape, and angle of the photo.

When you tap , iOS analyzes whatever horizontal lines it finds in the photo—the horizon, for example—and uses them as a guide to straightening the photo automatically.

It’s very smart. See how the photo has been tilted slightly—and enlarged slightly to fill the frame without leaving triangular gaps?

You can reject the iPhone’s proposal (tap Reset). Or you can tilt the photo more or less (drag your finger across the round scale).

If you want to rotate the photo more than 90 degrees—for example, if the camera took it sideways—tap as many times as necessary to turn the picture upright.

The other work you can do in this mode is cropping.

Cropping means shaving off unnecessary portions of a photo. Usually, you crop a photo to improve its composition—adjusting where the subject appears within the frame of the picture. Often, a photo has more impact if it’s cropped tightly around the subject, especially in portraits. Or maybe you want to crop out wasted space, like big expanses of background sky. If necessary, you can even chop a former romantic interest out of an otherwise perfect family portrait.

Cropping is also very useful if your photo needs to have a certain aspect ratio (length-to-width proportion), like 8 × 10 or 5 × 7.

To crop a photo you’ve opened, tap the . A white border appears around your photo. Drag inward on any edge or corner. The part of the photo the iPhone will eventually trim away is darkened. You can recenter the photo within your cropping frame by dragging any part of the photo, inside or outside the white box. Adjust the frame and drag the photo until everything looks just right.

Ordinarily, you can create a cropping rectangle of any size and proportions, freehand. But if you tap , you get a choice of eight canned proportions: Square, 3 × 2, 3 × 5, 4 × 3, and so on. They make the app limit the cropping frame to preset proportions.

This aspect-ratio feature is important if you plan to order prints of your photos. Prints come only in standard photo sizes: 4 × 6, 5 × 7, 8 × 10, and so on. But unless you crop them, the iPhone’s photos are all 3 × 2, which doesn’t divide evenly into most standard print sizes. Limiting your cropping to one of these standard sizes guarantees that your cropped photos will fit perfectly into Kodak prints. (If you don’t constrain your cropping this way, then Kodak—not you—will decide how to crop them to fit.)

When you tap one of the preset sizes, the cropping frame stays in those proportions as you drag its edges. It’s locked in those proportions unless you tap and choose a different setting.

Marking Up Your Photos

Here’s a feature nobody saw coming: You can draw or type on your photos, right from within the Photos app.

Once you’re in editing mode, tap and then Markup. You get a rather confusing assemblage of tools that fall into two categories:

• Draw. You get a pen (opaque lines, variable thickness as you press harder), a highlighter (translucent fat lines, variable opacity as you press harder), a pencil (very thin line), an eraser (tap a line to erase the whole thing), a lasso (select a line you’ve drawn to move it), and a dot for choosing the drawing color. (Those variable thicknesses and darknesses work only if you have an iPhone 6s or later.) You can use the Undo button () as often as you mess up.

• Text or objects. See the ? It produces a palette of options for adding shapes (square, circle, speech bubble, arrow, magnified “loupe”) or text (typed text or a signature) to your photo.

  Here’s how to operate these tools.

  Text: A text box appears on the photo, saying “Text.” Drag the tiny blue handles to adjust the shape of the box; drag inside to move the box. Double-tap it (or tap it and then tap Edit) to open the keyboard; type what you want it to say. Tap the photo to put away the keyboard. Tap the text box and then tap to choose font, size, and paragraph justification options.

  Signature: Tap to insert a handwritten signature. (And where do these stored signatures come from? You’ve tapped Add or Remove Signature and then , and then used your finger to write your name.)

  Magnifier: Tap to slap a magnified circular area onto your photo—great for calling out a detail. Drag the blue handle to adjust the circle’s size; drag the green one to adjust the degree of magnification inside it. And drag inside the circle to move it.

  Note

  You’re not enlarging this for your own editing purposes; this magnified area will stay magnified when you send the photo. It’s for calling your correspondent’s attention to some detail.

  

  Square, circle, speech bubble, arrow: Tap one to place it on your photo. Then tap to see some choices for line thickness and filled-inness. Drag blue dots to change size, or green ones to change shape—for example, the angle and direction of the speech balloon’s “where it’s coming from” angle, or the curvature of the arrow.

Editing Live Photos

Live Photos, as you now know, are a strange hybrid of videos and stills. Apple has decided to turn that weirdness into a virtue—by letting you create entertaining videos from your Live Photos.

When you tap Edit on a Live Photo, you get a few unusual controls. There’s a button, which lets you turn off the sound; a button, which eliminates the three-second video and creates a plain old photo; and a sort of filmstrip along the bottom. You can use it for two things:

• Drag the and markers (currently at the outer ends of the little filmstrip) inward, exactly as shown in “Time-Lapse Mode”. You’re trimming the Live Photo so that it’s shorter.

• Tap a different “frame” of the filmstrip, and then tap Make Key Photo, to designate that frame as the new face of this Live Photo—the one that shows up as its thumbnail in, for example, the Photos app.

But there’s even more fun to be had with Live Photos—and not in the Edit mode, either. (Hit Done or Cancel to get out of there, if necessary.)

On the Live Photo’s normal viewing page, the one with the and Edit buttons, you can swipe upward to reveal a choice of four special video-playback effects, which used to require separate apps to achieve:

• Live. That’s the normal Live Photo as you know it.

• Loop makes the three-second video play over and over again, with a crossfade to conceal the seam. Great for funny expressions, cat yawns, pratfalls.

• Bounce plays start → finish → start → finish, and so on, playing forward and then backward. Use it on a Live Photo of a kid doing a cannonball into a pool. Pure comedy.

• Long Exposure simulates the effect of leaving the camera on a tripod with the lens open for a long time. In “real” photography, the result might produce the milky, softly blurred surface of a babbling brook, or cool-looking red streaks of taillights.

  Realistically, this effect works only on scenes where the background doesn’t move, but the subject does. Classic examples include moving water, moving traffic, and moving people—in crowds or on teams.

  Unlike the other effects, the result of this one is a still image; the effect more or less superimposes all the frames in the Live Photo. (The video element is still there, looking like a standard Live Photo—hard-press the screen to see it.) But the goal here is to export the finished still image. Every now and then, the result is surprising and delightful.

Handing Off to Other Editing Apps

OK, Apple: Who are you, and what have you done with the company that used to believe in closed systems?

Maybe you’re a fan of Camera+, Fragment, or some other photo app. They now work so well with the Photos app that it can seem as though their tools are built right into it.

Here’s the drill: Open a photo in Photos. Tap Edit. Tap . Now you see the icons of all apps on your phone that have been updated to work with this feature, which Apple calls Extensibility.

The photo opens immediately in the app you choose, with all of its editing features available. You can freely bounce back and forth between Apple’s editor and its competitors’.

Saving Your Changes

Once you’ve rotated, cropped, auto-enhanced, or de-red-eyed a photo, tap the Done button. You’ve just made your changes permanent.

Or, rather, you’ve made them temporarily permanent. Remember: You can return to an edited photo at any time to undo the changes you’ve made (tap Revert). When you send the photo off the phone (by email, to your computer, whatever), that copy freezes the edits in place—but the copy on your phone is still revertable.

Step 1: Choose the Photos

Before you can send or post a photo or video, you have to tell iOS which one (or ones) you want to work with.

To send just one, well, no big mystery; tap its thumbnail and then tap .

But you can also send a bunch of them in a group—whenever you see a Select button. Tap it and then tap the photos you want to send—or drag through several in a row. With each tap, a appears, meaning, “OK, this one will be included.” (Tap again to remove the checkmark.)

Step 2: Preparing to Send

Once you’ve opened a photo (or selected a few), tap .

Now you have a huge array of “send my photo here” options, displayed in rows (above, left).

At the top of the Share screen, a scrolling row of other pictures appears. It lets you add more to the one(s) you’ve already selected, or deselect some of them. That’s a lot less crazymaking than having to back out of the Share screen to change your selection.

All right. Here’s an overview of the options available on the Share screen.

AirDrop

So very cool: You can shoot a photo, or several, to any nearby iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Mac—wirelessly, securely, conveniently, and instantly. See “AirDrop” for the step-by-steps.

Message

This row of options lists apps that can receive your photos and videos.

The Message icon lets you send a photo or video as a picture or video message. That’s a delicious feature, which people exploit millions of times a day.

Tap Message and then specify the phone number of the recipient; if you’re sending by iMessage, the email address also works. Or choose someone from your Contacts list. Then type a little note if you like, tap Send, and off it goes.

Mail

The iPhone attaches your photos or video clips to a new outgoing message. All you have to do is address it and hit Send. If it’s a big file, you may be asked how much you want the photo scaled down from its original size. Tap Small, Medium, Large, or Actual Size, using the megabyte indicator as a guide. (Some email systems don’t accept attachments larger than 5 megabytes.)

(Any video clip you send by email gets compressed—smaller, lower quality—for the same reason.)

Shared Albums

You can share batches of photos or videos with other people, either directly to their Apple gadgets or to a private web page. What’s more, they can (with your permission) contribute their own pictures to the album.

This is a big topic, though, so it gets its own write-up in “Deleting Photos from the Photo Stream”.

Add to Notes

Since the Notes app (“Notes”) can accommodate pasted pix or vids, why not?

A little box appears, inviting you to type some text into the newly illustrated photo note. You can also plop this picture into either a new note page or an existing one, using the pop-up menu at lower right.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr

If you’ve installed the apps for these services, then posting a photo from your phone to your Twitter feed, Facebook timeline, or Flickr collection is ridiculously simple.

Open the photo; tap the button; tap Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr. You’re offered the chance to type a message that accompanies your photo. (As usual with Twitter, you have a maximum of 280 characters for your message.) You can also tap Add Location if you want Twitterites or Facebookers to know where the photo was taken.

If you’re posting to Facebook, you can also indicate which people you’re sharing this item with—just your friends, everyone, and so on—by tapping Audience beneath the photo thumbnail. Flickr also offers a chance to specify which of your Flickr photo sets you want to post to.

When you tap Send or Post, your photo, and your accompanying tweet or post, zoom off to Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr for all to enjoy.

YouTube, Vimeo

Call up a video, if it’s not already on the screen before you. Tap . The Share sheet offers these video-specific buttons:

• YouTube. The iPhone asks for your Google account name and password (Google owns YouTube). Next it wants a title, description, and tags (searchable keywords like “funny” or “babies”).

  It then wants to know if the video will be in standard definition or high definition (and it gives the approximate size of the file). You should also pick a Category (Autos & Vehicles, Comedy, or whatever).

  Finally, choose from Public (anyone online can view your video), Unlisted (only people with the link can view it), or Private (only specific YouTubers can view it). When everything looks good, tap Publish.

  After the upload is complete, you’re offered the chance to see the video as it now appears on YouTube, or to Tell a Friend (that is, to email the YouTube link to a pal). Both are excellent ways to make sure your masterful cinematography gets admired.

• Vimeo. You’re supposed to have set up your name and password in Settings for Vimeo (a video site a lot like YouTube, but classier, with a greater emphasis on quality and artistry).

  If you’ve done that, then all you have to do, when posting a video, is to specify a caption or a description, and then tap Details to choose a video size and your audience (public, private, and so on). Once you tap Post, your video gets sent on to the great cinema on the web.

Save PDF to Books

This button converts whatever photos you’ve selected into a single, multipage PDF document that opens in Books (Chapter 11). In effect, it creates an ebook of your pictures.

After a moment of conversion, Books opens so you can inspect the results. You can now use all the tools available in Books (bookmarking, annotating, and so on). Better yet, you can send the resulting PDF document to someone else—a handy way to share a no-frills batch of pictures.

More

In the modern, extendable iOS, you can hand off a photo to other apps and services—beyond the set that Apple provides. If you tap More, you get the screen shown in “Step 1: Choose the Photos” at right.

That screen is basically a setup headquarters for the row of “where you can send photos” icons. Here you can rearrange them (put the ones you use most often at the top by dragging the handle); add to the list (turn on the switches for new, non-Apple photo-sharing apps you’ve installed); or hide the services you don’t use (turn off the switches). (You can’t turn off the switches for Message, Mail, and Shared Albums.)

Copy

The bottom row of sharing options lists things you can do to the selected photos.

The Copy button, for example, puts the photo(s) onto the Clipboard, ready for pasting into another app (an outgoing Mail message, for example). Once you’ve opened an app that can accept pasted graphics, double-tap to make the Paste button appear.

Copy iCloud Link

With one tap here, you can copy a link to your invisible Clipboard, ready for texting or emailing to someone: a link that lets them add the selected photos to their own copies of Photos! World’s simplest, least secure sharing method (because they can share that link with anyone).

Slideshow

This button instantly generates a gorgeous, musically accompanied, animated slideshow.

After the slideshow has begun, tap Options to see controls like these:

• Theme. A theme is a canned presentation style, incorporating animations, crossfades, and music. Each makes the photos appear, interact, overlap, and flow away in a different way. You’re offered five choices: Origami, Dissolve, Push, Magazine, and Ken Burns. (Some of these display more than one photo at a time.)

• Music. Choose one of the five pieces of background music here, opt for None, or tap iTunes Music to choose a song from your music collection.

• Repeat. Makes the slideshow play over and over again until you stop it manually.

• Speed. The slider controls how much time each photo gets.

The slideshow incorporates both photos and videos (with sound; the background music actually gets softer so you can hear the audio).

While the show is playing, here’s what you can do:

• Tap to summon the button.

• Turn the iPhone 90 degrees to accommodate landscape-orientation photos as they come up; the slideshow keeps right on going.

• Swipe leftward to blow past a photo or video that’s taking too long.

AirPlay

This button offers a list of nearby AirPlay gadgets—the only one you’ve probably heard of is Apple TV—so you can display the current photo on your TV or another screen.

Add to Album

If this is a photo you’ve taken with the phone, you’re now free to file it away into one of the albums you’ve made (“Effects Suggestions”).

Create Watch Face

This one’s for you, Apple Watch owners! Now a picture you took can become the background for a watch-face design.

Use as Wallpaper

Wallpaper is the background photo that appears in either of two places: the Home screens (plastered behind your app icons) or the Lock screen (which appears every time you wake the iPhone).

This button lets you replace Apple’s standard photos with one of your photos. It opens the Move and Scale screen, which lets you fit your photo within the wallpaper “frame.” Pinch or spread to enlarge the shot; drag your finger on the screen to scroll and center it.

Finally, tap Set. You now specify where you want to use this wallpaper; tap Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, or Set Both (if you want the same picture in both places).

You can also change your wallpaper within Settings, as described in “Wallpaper”.

Hide

Here’s the option to hide a photo, as described in “Hide a Photo”.

Save to Files

The iPhone now has a filing system, complete with folders (“Files”). Here you can plop the selected photo(s) into one of your iPhone “desktop folders.”

Duplicate

Make a copy of the photo, which you can doctor beyond all recognition.

Assign to Contact

If you’re viewing a photo of somebody listed in Contacts, then you can use it (or part of it) as her headshot. After that, her photo appears on your screen every time she calls. Just tap Assign to Contact.

Your address book list pops up. Tap the name of the person who goes with this photo.

Now you see a preview of what the photo will look like when that person calls. This is the Move and Scale screen. You want to crop the photo and shift it in the frame so only that person is visible (if it’s a group shot)—in fact, probably just the face.

Start by enlarging the photo: Spread your thumb and forefinger against the glass. As you go, shift the photo’s placement in the round frame with a one-finger drag. When you’ve got the person centered, tap Choose.

Print

You can print a photo easily enough, provided that you’ve hooked up your iPhone to a compatible printer. Once you’ve opened the photo, tap the button and then tap Print. The rest goes down as described in “AirPrint: Printing from the Phone”.

Save Image

This button appears when you’re looking at a photo somebody has texted or emailed to you. It saves the picture to your own photo collection, so you’ll be able to cherish it for years.

More

Once again, iOS offers a way to rearrange the Share buttons (this time, the bottom row)—or to add new buttons. If you don’t have an Apple Watch, for example, you may as well turn off the Create Watch Face option.

Deleting Photos from the Photo Stream

Here’s the thing about Photo Stream: You might think you’re taking a private picture with your phone, forgetting that your spouse or parent will see it seconds later on the family iPad. It’s only a matter of time before Photo Stream gets some politician in big trouble.

Fortunately, you can delete certain incriminating photos from your Photo Stream. Just select the thumbnail of the photo you want to delete, and then tap the Trash icon (). The confirmation box warns you that you’re about to delete the photo from all your Apple machines (and, for shared streams, the machines of everyone who’s subscribed to your photographic output).

If you haven’t saved it to a different album or roll, it’s gone for good when you tap Delete Photo.

Share Some Photos

To share some of your masterpieces with your adoring fans, do this:

1. Choose the photos. Open the Photos app. You can open just one photo, open an album, or use the Select button to select any random bunch of pictures.

2. Choose the album. Tap . On the Share sheet, tap Shared Albums (facing page, left). Here you can either choose an album you’ve already shared, or tap New Shared Album and then name the batch (“Bday Fun” or whatever; facing page, middle). Tap Next.

3. Specify the audience. You’re asked for the email addresses of your lucky audience members; enter their addresses in the To box just as you would address an outgoing email.

   For your convenience, a list of recent sharees appears below the To box.

4. Tap Next.

   You return to the original sharing windoid, where you can type a comment, if you like (“Here are my best pix of the reunion!”). In theory, you and other people can add to this album later. That’s why you’re offered the chance to caption each new batch.

5. Tap Post.

   Your recipients’ phones now get a notification that you’ve shared some pictures with them!

At any time, you can look over the Shared Album Activity list at the top of the For You tab in the Photos app. Here, for your amusement, is a visual record of everything that’s gone on in Shared Photo Album Land: photos you’ve posted, photos other people have posted, comments back and forth, likes, and so on. It’s your personal photographic Facebook.

Shared-Photo Management

Once you’ve shared some pictures like this, here’s how you can keep track or change your settings:

• Look over your shared albums by tapping the Albums tab and scrolling down to Shared Albums. (They also show up on the For You tab, under Shared Album Activity.) Then tap See All.

• Add more photos to an album. Tap Albums, then the shared album’s thumbnail, and then . Find the additional photos or videos, hit Select, choose them, and then tap Done. (You can also go the other way—by selecting the photos first, anywhere in the Photos app. Then hit , then Shared Albums, then the name of the album you’ve already shared, and then Post.)

• Delete some. Tap Albums, then the shared album, then Select, and then . Confirm with a tap on Delete Photo(s). (You’re not deleting photos from your collection—you’re just un-sharing them.)

• Change who can see this album. Tap Albums, then the shared album, and then People (previous page, right). At top, the list identifies everyone with whom you’ve shared the album. To add a new subscriber, tap Invite People. To delete a subscriber, tap the name and then (at the bottom of the contact card) tap Remove Subscriber.

• Change who can post to this album. Your subscribers can contribute photos and videos to your album. That’s a fantastic feature when it contains pictures of an event where there was a crowd: a wedding, show, political rally, picnic, badminton tournament. Everyone who was there can enhance the gallery with shots taken from their own points of view with their own phones or cameras.

  The on/off switch for this feature is on the Albums → [shared album] → People screen.

• Make the photos public. If you turn on Public Website (on the Albums → [shared album] → People screen), then even people who aren’t members of the Apple cult will be able to see these photos. The invitees will get an email containing a web address. It links to a hidden page on the iCloud website that contains your published photos.

  When you turn this switch on, the web address of your new gallery appears in light-gray type. Tap Share Link for a selection of methods for sending the link to people: by Message, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, AirDrop, and so on.

  What they’ll see is a mosaic of pictures, laid out in a grid on a single sort of web poster. Your fans can download their favorites by clicking the button. (You can’t add comments or “like” photos on the web, however.)

  Tip

  If you click one of these medium-sized photos, you enter slideshow mode, in which one photo at a time fills your web browser window. Click the arrow buttons to move through them.

• Adjust notifications. If the Notifications switch is on (on the Albums → [shared album] → People screen), then your phone will show a banner each time someone adds photos or videos to your album, clicks the “Like” button for a photo, or leaves a comment.

• Delete the Shared Album. If the whole thing gets out of hand, you can slam the door in your subscribers’ faces by making the entire album disappear. On the Albums → [shared album] → People screen, hit Delete Shared Album.

Receiving a Photo Album on Your Gadget

When other people share photo albums with you, your phone makes a little warble, and a notification banner appears (below, left): “[Your buddy’s name] invited you to join ‘[name of shared photo batch]’.”

Simultaneously, a badge like () appears on the Photos app icon and on the For You tab within Photos, letting you know how many albums have come your way.

You can tap the new album’s name to see what’s inside it; tap Accept.

Once you’re subscribed, you view the photos and movies as you would any album (above, right)—with a couple of differences. First, you can tap Comment to make worshipful or snarky remarks, or tap Like to offer your silent support.

You can also snag a copy of somebody’s published photo or video for yourself. With the photo before you, tap the button to see the usual sharing options—and tap Save Image. Now the picture or video isn’t some virtual online wisp—it’s a solid, tangible electronic copy in your own photo pool.

If your buddy has turned on Subscribers Can Post for this album, then you can send your own photos and clips into it; everybody who’s subscribed to it (and, of course, its owner) will see them.

To do that, tap the on the album’s page of thumbnails; choose your photos and movies; tap Done; add a comment; and tap Post.

Sharing Suggestions

On the For You tab, new in iOS 12, are groups of pictures and videos that Apple’s artificial-intelligence bot thinks might interest you. The big-ticket new feature in iOS 12 is Sharing Suggestions. These tiles appear when the app notices two things about a clump of pictures:

• There are people in the shots—especially people whose faces it recognizes, because you’ve tagged them in the Faces mode (???).

• They seem to be clustered around a certain time or place, suggesting that this was an outing, a vacation, an event, a party, or whatever.

iOS 12 is attempting to solve the age-old problem of different attendees having different photos of the same event. It lets all of you share all of your photos of the same event with everybody, wirelessly and in full resolution.

If Photos knows who’s in these photos, it says, “Share with Casey Robin?” (facing page, left). If not, it just says, “Share with friends?” Here’s how to proceed:

1. Tap the preview photo to open the details page for this batch.

   Here’s where you can see thumbnails of the photos that Photos intends to send (facing page, right).

2. Tap Select, and choose the photos you want to send.

   If you want to send most of them, tap the rejects to turn off their blue checkmark. If you want to send only a few, tap Deselect All and then tap to turn on the blue checkmarks.

   Tip

   In Select mode, you can drag your finger across the thumbnails to select a bunch of them quickly.

   

3. Tap Next. Choose the recipients.

   Now you’re on the Choose People to Share With screen. If Photos recognizes any faces, you’ll see their names.

   Note

   If you haven’t yet associated a Photos face with that person’s information in Contacts, do so now. Tap the name, tap Choose Existing Contact, and then find that person in your Contacts list. (Or Create New Contact, if you don’t have this person in Contacts yet.) You won’t have to repeat this process.

   If you’d like to share these photos with somebody not already identified, tap Add People; on the next screen, tap to choose the person’s name from Contacts (or type enough of the name until it’s recognized). Repeat until you’ve added everyone. Tap Done.

4. Tap Share in Messages.

   Now Messages opens, with your photo set represented as a link, all ready to send. Add a note, if you like, and then tap .

Let’s say you just shared some family-reunion photos with your Aunt Gertie. When she taps your link, she sees a screen almost identical to the one shown on the previous page—except that she sees an Add All button (meaning, she can add all those photos to her own photo library. Of course, she can also tap Select and choose only the winners.

Ah, but here’s the cool part. If Gertie also took some pictures at the reunion, she sees, on the same screen, a Share Back notice. It says, “Share your photos from ‘Family Reunion?’ ” so she can send her photos back to you. That way, you each wind up with a full collection (or as full as you choose). These are full-resolution original photos. (When she taps View, she sees her own set of Family Reunion photos, complete with a Select button, so that she can choose which photos to send to you.)

A few additional elements to Sharing Suggestions:

• The Sharing Suggestions are just another form of the Shared Albums feature described in “Deleting Photos from the Photo Stream”. For example, once you’ve shared an album, its thumbnail appears at the top of the For You tab, under the heading Shared Album Activity. It lets you monitor who’s got your pictures. You can also leave comments, or read other people’s comments, exactly as with the Shared Albums feature.

• If you want to withdraw your invitation, tap the thumbnail of the shared set (under Recently Shared); tap ; tap Stop Sharing. Incredibly, those photos now vanish from your friends’ collections, even after they’d accepted them.

• Sharing Suggestions works by sending a link (via Messages). Keep in mind that anyone who has this link can see those photos. For example, Aunt Gertie is capable of sharing that link with total strangers.

• You can also see the identical Sharing Suggestions within the Messages app, which makes sense, since you may well be chatting with the person in those photos. Tap the Photos app button (), and then swipe up to see them.

• Sharing Suggestions aren’t available immediately after you’ve installed iOS 12. It takes the phone a day or so to process all your pictures and choose which ones are worth grouping.

Recording Screen Video

For the first time in cellphone history, you can create video recordings of the screen—with narration, if you like. It’s fantastic as a teaching tool, if you want to capture some anomaly to send to tech support, or to demo your new app.

There’s only one way to get to this feature, and that’s using the Control Center. There’s no app, no Settings page, that even mentions it otherwise.

Once you’ve installed the Record Screen button onto the Control Center (“Customizing the Control Center”), tap it.

If you’d like to record narration, hard-press or long-press the button instead, and then tap the to turn the microphone on. Here, too, you can specify where you want the finished video to go. That’s usually your Camera Roll, where all other photos go, but some video apps may list themselves here, too. Then hit Start Recording.

You see a 3-2-1 countdown, which is intended to give you time to get out of the Control Center and into whatever app you’re trying to record.

Now do whatever it is you want to capture. (The phone’s status bar or left ear turns red to remind you that you’re rolling; unfortunately, that red patch will be part of the finished video, too.)

To stop recording, tap that red spot, or open the Control Center again and tap the Screen Recording button.

The finished video lands in your Photos app with all your other videos—with pristine quality and smooth motion, ready to share as you see fit.