Apple to Add More AI Photo Editing Tools to iOS 27
Among all the large smartphone manufacturers, Apple has so far been the most cautious in introducing AI-powered photo editing tools — but perhaps not for much longer.
According to the reliable Apple insider, Mark Gurman, when Apple unveils iOS 27 this fall, it will build on the sole existing AI tool in the Photos app: Clean Up.
Writing in Bloomberg, Gurman says that a host of new editing tools will be added under the new label: “Apple Intelligence Tools.”
The features identified by Gurman include Extend, Enhance, and Reframe. Extend is a familiar tool to most editors by now; it uses AI to extend an image beyond its original frame using the source image as a guide. Adobe Photoshop has a similar tool called Generative Expand.
Then there is Enhance, which sounds like an automatic editor. The tool will quickly scan the photo and automatically improve things like color and lighting. Think of it as a one-tap editor.
Reframe is a little different. It’s made for spatial photos, and it can shift the perspective of a photo. Say someone has taken a photo of the side of someone’s head, Reframe can shift the perspective so the viewer is looking at them from the front. The format was made for the Vision Pro headset.
Back in 2024, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said Apple wants to keep photos true to reality. But its big rivals, Samsung and Google, have both pushed aggressively into AI photo editing, with the aforementioned tools already existing on Android.
According to Gurman’s insider sources, the Extend and Reframe tools haven’t completely passed testing, and there is concern that Apple will delay them or scale them back. The existing Clean Up tool has faced criticism for not always working cleanly, leaving behind messy areas or random artifacts.
More broadly, Apple is looking to overhaul Siri and expand other areas of Apple Intelligence. It is looking to add a dedicated Siri app and to include a ChatGPT-like interface, allowing users to type things to Siri. Apple also hopes to boost the battery performance of its next generation of devices.
