iPhone owners to receive huge Photos upgrade with 11 new iOS 18 features – and they’re arriving in a matter of weeks

IPHONE owners are about to receive a huge upgrade to their Photos app, which Apple has called its “biggest redesign ever”.

There are a whopping 11 new Photos features that will be arriving in iOS 18, the software update expected to land on iPhones in a few weeks time.

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iPhone owners who are eligible for the iOS 18 update will be able to use five new Photos features right away[/caption]

Apple

Features that require Apple Intelligence to work are forecast to arrive slightly later than the initial iOS 18 features[/caption]

Of the 11 new Photo features, six of them rely solely on Apple Intelligence – the company’s sparkly new AI offering.

• See The Sun’s iOS 18 launch date prediction here

Photo boost

iPhone owners who are eligible for the iOS 18 update will be able to use five features right away, including:

Smarter Collections – Apple’s collections – the mini photo albums that are automatically generated – will organise your library by topics like Recent Days, Trips and People & Pets.

Pinned Collections – These give iPhone owners quick access to the collections or albums they love the most inside the Photo app.

Picture Carousel – A new swipe-through widget with a selection of snaps that displays handpicked photos in a poster-like view.

Locked Photos – Lock the Photos app behind Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.

Send higher-res photos more easily – With the long-awaited RCS support, iPhone owners will be able to send photos to Android owners over Wi-Fi or 5G/4G.

RCS support is set to bring eight iMessage-style features to texts between iPhone and Android users, including:

• Higher-resolution photos and videos
• Audio messages
• Typing indicators
• Read receipts
• Wi-Fi messaging between iPhones and Android devices
• Improved group chats, including the ability for iPhone users to leave a conversation that includes Android users
• Improved encryption compared to SMS
• Share location with people inside text threads

Apple

The Image Playground lets iPhone owners create personalised images based on the people in your camera roll and photo albums[/caption]

Apple Intelligence

Features that require Apple Intelligence to work are forecast to arrive slightly later than the initial iOS 18 features. These include:

Clean Up – A new AI-powered photo editing tool that lets users remove unwanted objects or people from photos.

Photo editing with Siri – The voice assistant will be able to adjust a photo’s color tone, brightness, and contrast from spoken instructions.

And that’s not the only way Siri is getting smarter.

Image Playground – This feature is designed to let users create images using text-based prompts.

The AI can create personalised images, in sketch, illustration and animation styles, based on the people in your photo album.

You can see how this feature works in the video above.

Natural language search – This will give users the option to search photos and videos using phrases like “Katie with stickers on her face” or “Mum on her birthday”.

Search within videos – iPhone owners will also be able to search for scenes midway through a video, such as “When Katie takes her first steps” or “When Mum blows the birthday candles out”.

Memory Movies – Which will automatically create personalised videos based on user-specified prompts, like Brooklyn dinner party or Edinburgh weekend.

While their arrival will be slightly belated, Apple boss Tim Cook is confident that Apple Intelligence features will arrive “by the end of the calendar year”.