Firing Up the Camera

Photographic opportunities are frequently fleeting; by the time you fish the phone from your pocket, wake it up, 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 photos) 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, 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 iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, and X models, whose two camera lenses create a softly blurred background that looks super-professional.

• Square. Why would Apple go to the trouble of designating a whole special camera mode to taking square, not rectangular, pictures? Answer: Instagram, the crazy-popular app that features square pictures and was sold to Facebook for nearly $1 billion.

• 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 whole photo brightens up; if you tap a bright part, the whole photo 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 (“Portrait Mode”), 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 auto-focus. (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.”)

No matter which model you have, the flash comes set to Auto. It turns on automatically when, in the iPhone’s opinion, the scene is too dark. But if you tap the when it says Auto, two other options pop out: On (the flash will fire no matter what the lighting conditions) and Off (the flash will not fire, no matter what).

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 help bring you “closer” to the subject—but (unless it’s a 7 Plus, 8 Plus, or X) 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, and X, 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 (which degrades the quality).

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. Scroll down; 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 solid-black silhouette. The camera doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle both the bright background and the person standing 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 single 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.

Until iOS 11 came along, 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, then 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 button or the volume key, a counter rapidly increments, showing you how many shots you’ve fired off.

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 help 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 of them 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 self-portrait 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 (three-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, in iOS 11, you have more options at your disposal—nine in all.

• To filter before you shoot. Tap to view your options (below, 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 on the previous page at right. When you’ve decided, take the shot as usual. (To turn off the filters, tap again.)

• To filter after you shoot. You can also apply a filter to any photo you’ve already taken (previous page, right); see “Snagging (or Sending) a Graphic”.

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 “3D Touch” for more on force-touching.)

Editing Live Photos

In iOS 11, 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.

Studio Lighting

On the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X, a further refinement to Portrait mode awaits, something Apple calls studio lighting.

When you’re examining a Portrait shot, you can tap Edit to summon 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. Contour Light deepens shadows, as though there were more light above the person. Stage Light, incredibly, cuts out the background, making it black (previous page, right). And Studio Light Mono does the same, but in black-and-white.

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

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 2436 × 1125 pixel iPhone X) 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, 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”.)

• 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 256-gigabyte iPhone, you can record 136 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.

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 (below, 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 “film strip” 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 bright 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 it 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 that 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 that 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 button? 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. In iOS 11, 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 new 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 film strip 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 in iOS 11, 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.

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.

• 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.

To “zoom in” from larger groupings to smaller ones (Years → Collections → Moments), 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 (Years, for example).

The last technique worth knowing is the Finger Browse. Whenever you’re looking at a grid of tiny thumbnail images (in a Year or a Collection, say), hold your finger 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.

The Memories Tab

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 automatic. Photos, short pieces of your videos, and even scrolling panoramas are all first-class citizens in these slideshows.

Right off the bat, you see a few of Photos’ suggestions, represented as clearly labeled billboards (“Cape Cod Summer,” “Best of Last Week”…).

Tap to open a Memory; at this point, you can scroll down to see more about what’s in this Memory. 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 bottom, you’ll see the option to Delete Memory or Add to Favorite Memories; that command 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. 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), Music (either the app’s selections or anything from your music library), Duration (dial up any length you want), or Photos & Videos (tap + 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 top.

The Albums Tab

(The third tab of your Photos app may actually be the Shared tab, but we’re skipping over it for now; see “iCloud Photo Sharing”.)

The Albums tab is a scrolling list of specialized photo “folders” like these:

• All Photos. Yup—everything on your phone, including videos (This may also be labeled “Camera Roll”; see “iCloud Photo Library”.)

• 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 transferred from your computer.)

• Favorite Memories appears only if you have, in fact, designated a Memory slideshow as a favorite (“The Memories Tab”).

• People. Impressively enough, Photos can auto-group the people in your photos, using facial recognition. 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 a photo of your kid for a school project, for example.

  To see it at work, tap People. Here are 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.

  Tap a thumbnail to see all the photos of this person. Scroll wayyyyy down to Confirm Additional Photos (Photos shows you other photos one at a time and asks, “Is this the same person?”); Favorite (or Unfavorite) This Person, and Add to Memories (creates a new Memory slideshow just of this person).

  TIP

  This feature doesn’t work until the iPhone has analyzed your photos, which can take at least a day and requires that the phone be plugged in. Apple proudly points out that all this analysis is done on your phone. (That’s in contrast to a service like Google Photos, which offers similar features but requires Google to access your photo library.)

  

  If you don’t see a thumbnail for a certain someone, scroll down and tap + to start the process of rounding up her pictures.

• 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 in the Albums list, you see a map, dotted with clusters of photos you took in each place. Tap one to see the photos you took there.

• Videos, Selfies, Live Photos, Portrait, Long Exposure, Panoramas, Time-Lapse, Slo-Mo, Bursts, Screenshots, Animated. 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. (Portrait appears only on the iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, and X; it contains shots you’ve taken using Portrait mode [“Portrait Mode”]. 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.

• 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.

• My Albums. Here you get a list of albums you’ve created (or copied to the phone from your Mac or PC).

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. (If albums are dimmed, that’s because they’ve been synced from your Mac or PC. You’re not allowed to mess with those. 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 Edit, and then tap the button next to the album you want to delete.

Hide a Photo

Here’s a quirky little feature: It’s possible to hide a photo from the Photos tab (Moments, Collections, and Years), 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 in Moments, Collections, and Years.

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

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

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.

  NOTE

  If you’ve brought in photos from your computer, the iPhone doesn’t store the giganto 20-megapixel originals you took with your fancy camera. It keeps only scaled-down, iPhone-sized versions—so you can’t zoom in more than about three times the original size.

  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.

Finding Photos

There’s a search icon () 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.

To try it out, tap at the top of the Photos or Albums screens. Right off the bat, the phone offers some one-tap canned searches based on locations and dates (like One Year Ago and Home). Tap to see the photos and videos that match.

To search for something more specific, you can type either of two kinds of things:

• A place, date, name, or album. Try typing september or tucson or bay area or 2016, for example. As you type, iOS displays all the photo groupings that match what you’ve typed so far. Tap that grouping to see the photo thumbnails within.

  TIP

  Then again, it’s usually faster to request such photos by voice, using Siri: “Show me all the photos from Texas in 2017.” See “Non-Apple Apps”.

• A noun. Type the photographic subject you’re seeking, like forest, girl, plane, piano, food, pizza, mountain, or whatever. In the results list, Photos lists matching pictures under a Category heading, like Pizza Category or Cat Category (below, left). Tap to see what the phone has rounded up for you (right).

  

  As you’ll soon discover, Apple’s image recognition software makes a lot of mistakes; you may well find a bar code or a picket fence in your Piano category, or a truck in your Cars category. But hey—it’s just software. Cut it some slack.

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 “Creating and Deleting Albums”; 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 Photo Library (“iCloud Photo Library”), 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. They show up either at the top or bottom of the screen, depending on how you’re holding the phone. (Tap again to hide them and summon a black background, for a more impressive photo presentation.)

• Album name. Here’s the group this photo came from.

• Favorite (). When you find a picture you really 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, described earlier), 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 on the following pages.

• Date and time. The top of the screen says “September 13, 12:52 pm,” 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 “Editing Photos”.

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

• Other photos. Immediately below the picture, Photos thoughtfully displays a ribbon of tiny thumbnail images (actually, more like pinkynail images). They represent the previous and following photos in this batch. By tapping or dragging, you can jump to another photo without having to back out of the opened-photo screen.

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.

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. 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 (below, 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 that you already did. That’s a lot less crazymaking than having to cancel out of the Share screen in order 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. It winds up on the screen of the other guy’s cellphone.

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, 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.)

iCloud Photo Sharing

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 “iCloud Photo Sharing”.

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 told your iPhone what your name and password are (in Settings → Twitter or Settings → Facebook or Settings → Flickr), 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 140 or 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, Education, or whatever).

  Finally, choose from Public (anyone online can search for and view your video), Unlisted (only people who have the link can view this video), 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 iBooks

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

After a moment of conversion, iBooks opens so you can inspect the results. You can now use all the tools available in iBooks (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 2: Preparing to Send” 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 iCloud Photo Sharing.)

Save Image

Suppose you’re looking at a photo that you didn’t take with the phone. Maybe someone texted or emailed it to you. This button saves it into your own photo collection, so you’ll be able to cherish it for years.

Assign to Contact

If you’re viewing a photo of somebody who’s 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.

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.

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 (“The Albums Tab”).

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.

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 (“The Carpenter’s Level”). Here you can plop the selected photo(s) into one of your iPhone “desktop folders.”

Use as Wallpaper

Wallpaper is the background photo that appears in either of two places: the Home screen (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”.

Duplicate

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

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”.

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, 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.

Create a Shared Photo Album

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

1. Create the empty album. Open the Photos app. On the Shared tab, scroll to the top (if necessary) and tap +.

2. Name the new album. In the Shared Album box, name the photo album (“Bday Fun” or whatever). 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.

   When that’s done, tap Create. You return to the list of shared albums, where your newly named album appears at the top. It is, however, completely empty.

   

4. Pour some photos or movies into the album. Tap your new, empty album’s name. Then, on the next screen, tap the + to burrow through your photos and videos—you can use any of the three tabs (Photos, Shared, Albums)—to select the material you want to share. Tap their thumbnails so that they sprout checkmarks, and then tap Done.

   A little box appears so that you can type up a description.

5. Type a description of the new batch. 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.

   Once that’s done, tap Post.

The thumbnails of the shared photos and videos appear before you—and the + button is there, too, in case you want to add more pictures later.

Adjusting an Album’s Settings

Before you set your album free, tap the People tab at the bottom of the screen. Here are a few important options to establish for this album:

• Invite People. This 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.

• Subscribers Can Post. 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.

• Public Website. If you turn on Public Website, 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.)

• Notifications. If this switch is on, 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 Shared Album. That’s right: If the whole thing gets out of hand, you can slam the door in your subscribers’ faces by making the entire album disappear.

Read on to see what it’s like to be the person whose email address you entered.

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: “[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 Shared 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—with a couple of differences. First, you can tap Add a 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 the album; 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.

Fun with Shared Photo Albums

Once you’ve created a shared photo album, you can update it or modify it in all kinds of ways:

• Add new photos or movies to it. In Photos, open the shared photo album, whether it’s one you created or one you’ve subscribed to. Tap +. Now you can browse your whole world of photos, tapping to add them to the photo album already in progress.

• Remove things from it. In Photos, open the shared photo album. Tap Select, tap the item(s) you want to delete, and then tap —and confirm with a tap on Delete Photo(s).

• Delete an entire shared photo album. Tap the People tab below an open photo album, scroll down, tap Delete Shared Album, and confirm by tapping Delete.

• Change who’s invited, change the name. The People tab is also where you can add to the list of email addresses (tap Invite People), remove someone (tap the name, and then tap Remove Subscriber), rename the album, or turn off Public Website to dismantle the web version of this gallery.

At any time, you can tap the Activity “folder” at the top of the Shared 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.

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 . 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’re trying to capture. (The phone’s status bar turns red to remind you that you’re rolling; unfortunately that red bar will be part of the finished video, too.)

To stop recording, tap that red bar, 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.