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10 Apple 'Photos' Hacks Every iPhone User Should Know
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Apple's Photos app is more than a simple camera roll that eats up all your iCloud storage space. Contrary to popular belief, you can customize the app to make it easier to find the pictures and videos you're looking for, while hidden features help you clean up your storage and keep your media collection organized. If you have an iPhone, these 10 hacks are a must.
Use Reorder to customize what’s shown in the Collections screen
The Collections tab in the Photos app arranges itself automatically, showing you suggested photos, memories, and highlight reels at the top. Unfortunately, the way Apple orders things is a bit of a mess. The thing is, Photos has plenty of useful categories and shortcuts for accessing media quickly, such as for screenshots, custom albums, and utilities like Hidden Folder. As such, you should reorder the Collections tab to make it work better for you. Tap the Menu button at the top of the Collections tab and choose Reorder. My advice is to bring the Utilities and Media Types collections to the top, as they serve as useful shortcuts.
Use "Captured By Me" to hide screenshots and saved photos
If you're like me, your camera roll is filled with too many screenshots, saved photos, memes, GIFs, and videos. They all have their place, but the clutter gets in the way when you want to see or show photos you’ve actually clicked with your iPhone’s camera. As it happens, iOS 27 adds a new feature called "Captured By Me" that only filters photos and videos you’ve shot yourself. If you go to the Collections tab, you’ll find a new Captured By Me section in Utilities. You can also activate this when browsing photos in Library using the Filter button.
Hide photos of an ex from showing up in Memories
Apple’s Photos suggestions are so good, I let the app handle the images that show up on my iPhone and Apple Watch's wallpaper, along with a widget on my iPhone's Home Screen. But suggestions are only as good as your curation. The last thing you want is to see a photo of your ex (or an ex-friend) when you’re trying to get through emails in the morning. If you don’t want to see a person too often, open their photo, tap the Menu button and choose Don’t Feature a Person. You have two choices here. You can either choose Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person. The latter option, of course, is best for exes, while the former works better for anyone you don't want to cut out entirely, but would like to see a little bit less of.
Hide the Hidden folder to truly protect your sensitive photos
The Photos app's Hidden folder is an excellent tool for locking away pictures and videos from your main library. The issue is, the folder might still be accessable by anyone who gets their hands on your iPhone. As such, make sure to lock the Hidden folder behind a Face ID lock to truly protect your sensitive pics. To do so, go to Settings > Apps > Photos > Albums and enable Face ID to automatically enable the hidden folder lock.
Make sure to completely delete photos from the Trash
Deleted photos aren’t actually deleted—at least, not right away. Apple actually stores deleted photos for 30 days, helpful when you accidentally delete a photo or have second-thoughts, but it’s a double-edged sword. Someone in the know could snoop through your deleted album and retrieve images you assumed were gone forever. These photos and videos are also taking up storage you likely assumed you got back by "deleting" them. As such, make sure to empty the Trash as well. Go to Photos > Utilities > Recently Deleted and tap the Delete All button.
Use the Identity Documents collection to quickly find photos of your IDs
While it’s not the most secure option, keeping some identification documents, passes, or tickets as photos can help in a pinch. It seems like Apple knows that this is a common use case. In iOS 27, if you go to the Collections tab, you’ll find a new Identity Documents section under the Utilities dropdown. When you open it, you’ll find an automatically curated grid of all the photos that contain IDs. If you like this feature, I highly recommend using the first hack in this list to reorder the Collections screen, putting the Identity Documents section right at the top.
Use this hidden feature to force Photos to sync immediately to iCloud
iCloud can be a huge help for managing your ever-growing Photos library. As long as you have available cloud storage, photos and videos are uploaded in the background automatically, and if you’re low on storage on your iPhone, "Optimize Storage" automatically offloads the files to the cloud.
Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t work when you really want to. Perhaps you want to add photos in a shared album, or you want to see photos on your Mac. But your iPhone is low on battery, or on a spotty connection, so the photos never seem to sync. Now, if you’re running iOS 27, you can use a hidden setting to force iCloud sync. Go to Settings > Photos > Sync Immediately and enable For Today.
Use Clean Up's "High-Quality" mode to remove objects from your photos
When it launched, Apple’s Clean Up tool left something to be desired. It would remove objects, but leave weird shadows or blobs behind. With the release of Apple’s new Siri AI, Clean Up gets a big upgrade—but only if you use Apple’s iCloud servers. (Apple says its service, Private Cloud Compute, secures your data.) As such, Clean Up is now a reliable option to quickly remove objects from your photos. Open an image, tap on Edit, choose the Tools option, and select the Clean Up tool. From the top, make sure to switch to the High-Quality option to use Apple’s servers. Highlight parts to remove, and tap Clean Up. If it’s a heavier edit, you might need to wait for a minute or two. In my experience, the result will be worth it.
Use "Paste Edits" to copy and paste edits from one photo to multiple photos
It can get tedious to apply the same edits across multiple photos. Luckily, you don't need to waste time fiddling with the same sliders on each image: Photos lets you copy all edits from one image and paste them to multiple photos. To do so, choose your edited photo or video, tap the Menu button, and choose Copy Edits. Then, review and disable any edits you don’t want, and choose Copy. Now, go back to your Library, tap Select, and choose all the photos or videos where you want to apply the same edit. Tap the Menu button and choose Paste Edits to add the same edit settings to all images.
Use Live Text to pull text from images
Apple’s Live Text feature turns any text digital. Snap a photo of a menu, and you can copy it. Scan a page, and you can paste it in Notes. But it’s not just limited to the camera or screenshots: It’s integrated directly into the Photos app as well, and arguably, it’s the easiest place to use this feature. When you are viewing an image with text in it, you will see the Live Text icon in the bottom right. Tap on it, and iOS will highlight the text in the image. You can tap and hold to take action on text, and you can easily copy things from here as well.
