iOS 27 Photos app features, and which iPhone runs each one

What shipped, and when

iOS 27 was released on Monday 14 September 2026, five days after Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro. It supports iPhone 11 and later, plus iPhone SE second generation and later, which is an unusually long tail for an Apple release.

That support list matters, because iOS 27 splits sharply into two halves. The organisational and sharing features run on everything. The generative editing features need an Apple Intelligence device, which in practice means an A17 Pro chip or newer with 8GB of memory: iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, every iPhone 16 model, every iPhone 17 model, and iPhone Air. An iPhone 14, an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 15 Plus runs iOS 27 and does not get Clean Up, Extend or Reframe.

Apple also claims broad performance work in this release, including faster app launching and noticeably faster photo loading in the library. That is Apple's own figure rather than an independent measurement, but the Collections tab does render quicker than it did.

The three AI editing tools, and who can run them

Clean Up is the one most people will use and the one that improved most. The original version was tuned for blemishes and small distractions and visibly failed on anything the size of a person. The iOS 27 version handles larger objects and offers three quality modes, so you can trade time against result rather than accept one outcome.

Extend is the most interesting and the most dangerous. It lets you turn a tight 4:3 frame into a 16:9 one by generating the missing edges, which is genuinely useful for wallpapers and for rescuing a crop you got wrong. It is also generating pixels that were never in the room, which is fine for a lock screen and not fine for anything anyone might treat as a record.

Reframe is the newest idea: it uses the depth and spatial data the camera already captures to re-angle a subject, so a photo taken slightly too low can be nudged. Small corrections look plausible. Ask for a big change and the geometry goes strange.

Ratings, keywords and the new folders

The quieter half of the release is the more useful one for most libraries, and it runs on every iPhone that can install iOS 27.

You can now assign one to five star ratings and keyword tags to photos and videos, and filter by rating. That is a proper cataloguing feature of the kind Lightroom users have had for fifteen years, and it is the first time Apple has given the Photos app a way to mark a keeper that is not a heart.

Two new Utilities folders appeared. Captured by Me collects only the photos taken with the Camera app on your own iPhones, current and past, which finally separates your photographs from the thousands of screenshots and saved memes around them. Identity Documents gathers passport and licence photos into one place.

You can also save a single frame out of a video as its own photo without screenshotting it, which preserves the full frame resolution instead of your screen resolution. And you can build a slideshow from any album, collection or selection, with transitions, per-slide duration and background music.

Shared albums, now open to Android and Windows

Shared Albums got the largest functional change in years: people on Android and Windows can now contribute to an iCloud shared album through a web browser, at full resolution. If you have ever run a shared album for a wedding or a group trip and watched half the party unable to add anything, this fixes it.

Alongside that: you can filter a shared album by photos or videos, set a shared album to expire after 30 days, create album links with different permission levels, see a log of recent activity, and react to an image with any emoji instead of a single like.

Full-resolution support now covers all formats in shared albums, which removes the old quiet compromise where a shared album quietly gave everyone a smaller file than the one you added.

A practical note: an expiring album is the right default for anything with other people's children in it. Set 30 days and let it disappear rather than leaving a permanent link in a group chat.

What changed in the Camera app

Three Camera changes, and the split between them is the whole story of iOS 27.

Customisable controls, every iPhone on iOS 27. The row of controls above the shutter is now editable. Tap Edit and add or remove controls, separately for each mode, so Photo can carry exposure and aspect ratio while Video carries frame rate.

Siri mode, Apple Intelligence iPhones. A mode in the camera carousel that runs Visual Intelligence live on the frame: identifying plants and animals, reading nutrition off food, translating text, lifting an event from a flyer into Calendar. Some sub-features, including splitting a bill through Apple Cash, are United States only at launch.

Pro controls, Photographic Styles 3 and Apple Reference Image, iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max only. Manual lens aperture, shutter speed and white balance with a live histogram. Texture and grain controls added to Photographic Styles. And Apple Reference Image, which captures signed sensor data so the original can be verified later. None of the three comes to older hardware.

Image Playground was also rebuilt: it now generates photorealistic images for the first time and can edit from a photo rather than only generate. Everything it makes carries an invisible SynthID watermark.

Honest limits, and what is still missing

The Photos app remains a viewer with editing bolted on. It has no layers, no local adjustment brushes worth the name, no curves, and no batch editing. If you want to apply one look across forty photos from the same evening, Lightroom Mobile still does it and Photos still does not. Lightroom's free tier covers most of that, with masking behind its premium tier.

Clean Up is better and still not Snapseed's patch-based healing for fiddly repairs, and Snapseed remains free with no subscription. For removing a person from a busy beach, Clean Up on High Quality is now genuinely competitive. For rebuilding a repeating pattern behind them, a patch tool you control by hand still wins.

Generative editing is also rate limited in practice: Extend and Reframe run against daily allowances rather than being unlimited, so a long editing session can stop.

Our own app sits in a different place: ShutterAI is ours, so treat this as the disclosure it is. It is a camera with film and digicam looks that render live on photo and video, plus Glow for skin-safe retouch and Clean Up for removing people, and it keeps originals in a Vault so edits stay reversible. It is coming to iPhone this fall, free to start, with a waitlist.