Apple’s Photos app has exactly one AI editing tool since the launch of Apple Intelligence in 2024. Clean Up lets you remove objects from a shot, and that’s pretty much it. According Bloomberg’s Mark GurmaniOS 27 photo editing is about to change this in a big way, with three new AI-powered tools coming to the Photos app.
The new tools will live inside a dedicated “Apple Intelligence Tools” section in the photo editing interface. Enhance automatically adjusts colors, lighting, and overall image quality. Extend Generates new content beyond the original edges of the photo. Crop too much on a shot and you may stretch the frame out, allowing the AI to fill in the rest. Reframe is built on spatial photos and lets you change perspective after the fact. Gurman says all three tools run on the device, so your photos stay local rather than uploaded to a server.
not everything is ready yet
According to Gurman’s report, Extend and Reframe are not performing reliably in internal testing. Apple may roll back or delay those features depending on how much the underlying AI models improve before launch. Clean Up still has its problems more than a year after shipment, so it’s no surprise that newer and more complex devices are running into trouble.
Google has offered tools like generative photo enhancement and magic eraser for years. Samsung has resorted to AI editing to differentiate its Galaxy lineup, even though the hardware remains mostly the same. By now Apple had a tool. These additions bring iOS 27 photo editing closer to where Android has been for some time.
iOS 27 will be unveiled at WWDC on June 8, and is expected to be released publicly in the fall. Apple Intelligence features in iOS 27 reportedly require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, so not every iPhone running the update will get these tools. And given Apple’s recent track record with AI features launching late or in pieces, “announced at WWDC” and “available on day one” are two very different things.
