The iOS 27 Camera app, feature by feature

What this page covers, and what it does not

iOS 27 was released on Monday 14 September 2026 and runs on iPhone 11 and later, plus iPhone SE second generation and later. This page is about the Camera app: the thing you open to take a photograph.

It is not about the Photos app. Extend, Reframe, the rebuilt Clean Up, star ratings, keywords, slideshows and the shared album changes all live there, and they are covered on our iOS 27 Photos app features page. The two apps changed in different directions this year, and mixing them up is the fastest way to get confused about what your phone can do.

The Camera side in short: one change for everybody, one for Apple Intelligence phones, and three for the two newest phones. That tier gap is wider this year than it has been in a while.

The editable controls panel

This is the change that affects the most people and gets the least attention.

The row of controls above the shutter, and the drawer behind it, can now be edited. Open the controls panel by tapping the icon beside the shutter or swiping up from the mode carousel, tap Edit in the corner, and add or remove controls. It works on every iPhone that can run iOS 27, from an iPhone 11 upwards.

The detail people miss is that each mode keeps its own set. Photo, Video and Portrait are configured separately, so Photo can carry the exposure adjustment and aspect ratio you use constantly while Video carries frame rate and resolution. Nothing you add to one appears in the other.

Three controls worth promoting into the default row on any iPhone.

• Exposure Adjustment. A standing plus or minus that persists across frames, unlike the sun icon you drag after tapping, which resets the moment you lift your finger. Set it slightly under for faces in bright light.
• Photographic Styles. Faster to reach than Settings, so you will actually use it.
• Aspect ratio. If you post to a platform with a fixed shape, framing to it at capture beats cropping later and throwing away pixels. Our Instagram photo sizes guide covers which shape to pick.

Pair this with Settings, Camera, Preserve Settings, and turn on Camera Mode, Creative Controls and Exposure Adjustment, or the app forgets everything on every launch.

Siri mode in the Camera app

Siri is now a mode in the camera carousel, alongside Photo, Video and Portrait. Swipe to it and Visual Intelligence runs on whatever is in the frame rather than on a screenshot.

What it does: identifies plants and animals, reads nutrition information off food, translates text in the frame, and lifts an event off a poster or a flyer straight into Calendar. Some sub-features, including splitting a bill through Apple Cash, are United States only at launch.

It needs Apple Intelligence hardware, which means iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, every iPhone 16, every iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and the iPhone 18 Pro models. An iPhone 14 or a standard iPhone 15 runs iOS 27 and does not get this.

The honest assessment: it is a convenience rather than a camera feature. It does not change how a photograph looks, and translation and plant identification were already reachable through Visual Intelligence without it. What it removes is friction, which is worth something when you are standing in front of a menu in a language you do not read.

The three iPhone 18 Pro features

These are the significant additions, and they run on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max only.

Pro controls. A manual panel covering lens aperture, shutter speed, white balance and a live histogram, working in photo and in video. Lens aperture only exists because the iPhone 18 Pro main camera has a mechanical aperture that moves between f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4.0. Two absences are worth naming: no ISO control, so you set a shutter speed and the phone still chooses the gain, and no manual focus slider. Both have been available in third-party camera apps for years, and the aperture range is now open to them through a new API.

Photographic Styles 3. A Texture control with options including Soft Skin, Glow and Film, plus a separate Grain control, added to the existing undertone styles and tone and colour pad. Our Photographic Styles 3 page goes through what each setting does.

Apple Reference Image. Turn it on under Settings, Camera, Reference Image, then Add Reference Mode, and a Reference mode appears in the carousel. Shooting in it makes the sensor cryptographically sign the pixel data it captures, using a private key generated when the phone was built, before firmware can alter anything. Private Cloud Compute develops that into an unalterable reference image, which sits beside the photo in Photos so you can compare the two and see whether edits were made.

What Reference Image does not do, in Apple's own framing: it tells you the pixels came from that iPhone's sensor and were not altered afterwards. It says nothing about whether the scene was real. Photograph an AI-generated image on a screen and the reference image will faithfully attest that your iPhone photographed a screen.

Which iPhone runs which feature

The pattern is worth naming. In previous years the Camera app's new features were mostly software and mostly arrived across the range. This year the three headline additions are tied to one camera module, so the split is hardware, not marketing, at least for two of the three.

What did not change, and what is unconfirmed

Plenty stayed exactly as it was, which is good news if you have built habits around it. Camera Control works as before on the models that have it, with the light press, the double light press and the swipe through Exposure, Depth, Zoom, Cameras, Styles and Tone. Our Camera Control page covers it in full. Tap to meter, press and hold for AE and AF lock, volume up as a shutter and volume up held as a burst are all unchanged. Night mode, Action mode, macro, Live Photos and Portrait mode behave as they did.

Two things to flag as not confirmed rather than reported as fact. Ahead of release, beta code was reported to contain exposure scopes, including waveform displays, and focus peaking, which highlights the edges of whatever is in focus. Apple did not announce either, and neither appears in the features it has documented. They may arrive in a later iOS 27 update, they may be limited to a subset of hardware, or they may not ship at all. Treat them as unconfirmed until Apple says otherwise.

Also worth knowing: Apple's performance claims for iOS 27 include the Camera app opening faster in Low Power Mode. That is Apple's figure, not an independent measurement.

Our own app sits alongside rather than inside all this, so treat it as the disclosure it is: ShutterAI is ours, it renders film and digicam looks live on photo and video and has Wave to Shoot for a palm-gesture shutter. It reaches iPhone this fall, free to start, and the waitlist is here.