In iOS 27, Apple is bringing a welcomed set of changes to the stock Camera app. Here’s how it has evolved, what you can now do, and what we didn’t see.
There are hundreds of changes throughout iOS 27, and the Camera app has its fair share. It’s both easier to use and more powerful than before, so let’s walk through it.
Jumping into the app, it still looks very familiar. The general layout, color scheme, and functionality have all remained.
The shutter button is centered at the bottom, with the gallery button to the lower-left and one to flip the camera around on the right. Along the top you have all of your current settings, such as resolution, exposure, and more.
Updated controls
The first big change has to do with those controls. With iOS 27, Apple is making it easier to find and adjust them.
Instead of hiding them at the top of the app in a little icon, there is a new grid icon for in-app controls just to the right of the shutter.
This opens a popover at the bottom with all the various controls you can change. These are relative to your current shooting mode, so you’ll see different options when you’re in video versus photo mode.
Controls have been moved into a redesigned popover
Because Apple is surfacing these controls more, it seems it is also trying to simplify things. Some of these controls, like resolution, have been removed from the Camera section within Settings.
So, if you’re looking for something, be sure to check first in the Camera app itself before digging into the Settings app.
Dedicated Siri mode
The second big change is a new shooting mode. Swipe left in the app to go to Video mode and swipe right to go to the new Siri mode.
A new Siri mode has been added to the Camera app
Siri mode is both new and old. It’s new in the sense that the Camera app didn’t have a dedicated mode in the past, but it’s old because the functionality just lived in a different place.
Prior to iOS 27, you could long-hold the Camera Control to launch Visual Intelligence. This is an AI mode to perform all sorts of different visual tasks, like translating text, looking up an outfit you like, and more.
Siri mode, or Visual Intelligence, can do many things, including looking up what type of tomatoes these are randomly growing in my garden. I did not plant them!
Siri mode, is just Visual Intelligence baked into the Camera app. This will make it far easier for users to find and take advantage of the newfound AI abilities in iOS 27.
Some other tasks we’ve used it for recently including looking up the variety of tomatoes that was growing in our garden, calculating the number of calories in an entire container of raspberries, and scanning a wedding invite to add it to our calendar.
Visual Intelligence in the new Siri mode can tell you how many calories in this container of raspberries
To be clear, the Camera Control can still be used to launch Visual Intelligence. A long-hold of the Camera Control in iOS 27 just launches the Camera app straight into Siri mode.
More changes
In other changes, Apple is introducing RAW 9. This is its RAW processing pipeline that will apply to RAW images taken with both iPhone and other cameras.
The new version of RAW has much better definition and its easier to make out the colors
Apple is calling this its biggest update yet for RAW support and drastically improves the rendering of RAW files. It uses a new CoreML model and combines demosaic with denoise for the best image quality and runs entirely on device using the Apple Neural Engine cores.
The new version of RAW has much better definition
In a developer session, Apple highlighted a few images to show the improvement in both color separation and noise reduction. Compared to RAW 8, which was excellent, RAW 9 is significantly better.
In the fifth developer beta of iOS 27, it was leaked that Apple is working on a new reference mode. It’s essentially a way to authenticate where images came from, which is increasingly important with the prevalence of generative AI.
A new Reference Image setting may be coming to iOS 27
Code shows that iOS 27 would use unique camera hardware information to verify an image is real. This would leverage Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture.
The feature will be user-enabled and an uncovered splash screen provides some details on how the feature works. Apple is clear that if you enable it, your photo and its metadata will be sent to Private Cloud Compute, though nothing sent there is ever saved.
What we didn’t see
Surprisingly, what we didn’t see was a more drastic change to the Camera app. Early rumors pointed to a new Camera app with a completely customizable layout.
Instead, we got the more modest design change that Apple previewed at WWDC. Even though the changes seem largely positive, it’s disappointing Apple didn’t do more.
As is often the case, camera upgrades sound like they may be a big focus of the new iPhone 18 announcement
One possibility is that Apple will highlight the new Camera app alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. It could then theoretically bring the app to the older models as well, similar to how it has launched Apple Watch faces in the past.
It could lean into the camera hardware changes with a big app upgrade to match. This may just be wishful thinking, and fortunately there are a lot of great third-party camera apps like Moment Pro Camera or Halide.
This story originally appeared on Appleinsider
