With the iOS 17 Photos and Camera apps, Apple has added several features that make the apps more pleasant to use. Visual Look Up can recognize more than ever, including various mystery symbols you encounter in your daily life, and the Photos app detects your pets and puts them in their own album.
This guide describes all the new features of iOS 17 Photos and Camera app.
Pet recognition
In addition to people, the Photos app can recognize specific animals, so you can automatically sort your pets into albums. Accordingly, the People album has been renamed the “People & Pets” album.
The pet recognition feature works with cats and dogs, and Apple says human recognition has improved as well.
Visually look up
Apple has given Visual Look Up some major updates. In a nutshell: Visual Look Up is the name of the feature that allows you to get more information about the subject of a photo when you tap the information button in the Photos app.
For images of food, the iPhone identifies what’s in the photo and presents recipes from the Internet. A whole range of symbols can now be recognised, from street signs to dashboard icons to the washing instructions you see on clothing labels. If you take a picture of one of these symbols and then tap for information, the iPhone can tell you what it means.
You can also long-press an image gesture to pull the subject out of the background of an image and look up what it is, if compatible with Visual Look Up.
Finally, Visual Look Up can be used in videos. You can pause a video at any frame and tap the info button to look up what’s in the video.
Crop with one tap
When zooming in on an image in the Photos app, you can tap the “Crop” button on the top right corner to crop the image without entering the photo editing interface.
Photo interface changes
In the photo editing interface, the Cancel and Done buttons have been moved to the top of the screen, and all tool icons have text descriptions to explain what they do.
Camera leveling
A new level option in iOS 17 adds a horizontal line to the Camera app so you can make sure landscape photos are aligned and level before taking an image.
QR code updates
While the iPhone’s Camera app has been able to read QR codes since iOS 11, iOS 17 fixes an interface that has been annoying for quite some time. Instead of the link for a QR code appearing in the center of the screen, it now appears at the bottom of the screen, making it easier to tap.
cinematic mode
Apple has added a Cinematic API for third-party apps, which allows photo and video apps to play and edit videos in Cinematic mode.
Animated stickers
The Remove Subject From Background tool turns any Live Photo into an animated sticker that you can use in Messages and other apps.
Just long press on the subject in a photo and then choose the “Add sticker” option. From there, you can add effects such as a white sticker outline, a “puffy” sticker effect, glitter, and more.
This feature also works with any photo if you just want a still image.
Screenshot updates
If you take a screenshot in iOS 17, you will see the Save to Photos option that saves the full page of the screenshot as an image. Previously, the full page screenshot feature could only save it as PDF.
read more
Learn more about all the new features in the iOS 17 update in our iOS 17 overview.