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The Complete Guide to Every iOS 27 Feature

What’s New for Apple Pay and Wallet in iOS 27

by Kevin Hollington

Wallet bulges with the addition of even more features to an already stuffed portfolio.

You can create entries for cards, membership cards, and other kinds of barcode/QR code-related proofs of entry or membership from scratch, a task formerly available only for third-party apps and websites.

Tap the Add button in Wallet, then tap Create a Pass. You’re guided through a few steps, one of which lets you scan the existing card, so that Wallet can pull in its number, barcode, or QR code. You can fill out details that aren’t present on the card or captured by Wallet.

A “poster”-style card display used for passes now extends to membership cards, gift cards, and loyalty/reward cards. This new display allows up to two tappable actions.

In unrelated updates, Wallet now shows trip details and other real-time updates to hotel keys at hotels that support these new options.

Finally, a new Preauthorized Payments section in Wallet gives you a one-stop insight into what you’ve allowed other companies to charge you for. Apple describes this as “subscriptions and auto-reloads to installment loan repayments, recurring billing, and deferred payments” among other preauthorizations.

Apple Pay and Tap to Share

Apple made one systemwide change, with big updates to Apple Pay and point-of-sale payments.

After many years of mostly unchanged experiences, Apple offers a blowout with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.

The updated Apple Pay checkout sheet lets you change your payment card directly without canceling, exiting, and starting over. It will also show information like available rewards, debit card balance, and alternative payment options. These changes are noted as coming “this fall,” while “later this year” you’ll be able to add funds to a debit card during a checkout session without exiting, or within Wallet.

Apple now allows merchants to let you pay with a third-party browser using Apple Pay with a scannable code and an iPhone as the glue. Start the payment in a third-party browser, choose Apple Pay, and the merchant’s site will display a code that can be scanned by an iPhone to authorize Apple Pay.

Entirely new is Tap to Share with merchants at the point of sale, such as in a store or at a fair. This makes in-person Apple Pay more akin to Apple Pay in Safari. Tap to Share lets an entire set of interactions occur before you pay. You start by approving a connection with a merchant’s iPhone that has a supported payment app. (Ostensibly, this may encompass not just companies like Square and Stripe, but in-house developer apps for retailers like Old Navy or Lowe’s.)

Once you begin, you can choose what you share with the business—like contact details, a shipping address, or your email. This also means you don’t have to state this information aloud or rely on the merchant typing it in correctly! A merchant can offer to sign you up for a membership or loyalty program. You can use a pass from the merchant, or they can issue one, related to discounts, credits, or other transaction-related purposes. Finally, you see the full cart as a digital receipt before completing payment with Apple Pay.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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What’s New for iPad in iPadOS 27

by Moses Johnson

Apple rethought the iPad interface with iPadOS 26, adding robust windowing and multitasking features that brought it much closer to a general-purpose computing system like macOS. However, it still retained its unique iPad nature, such as its heavy reliance on gestures.

iPadOS 27 builds on these improvements with refinements that help you use an iPad even more fully in the liminal space between tablet and computer.

Use keyboard automation triggers

Apple previously didn’t offer a way to trigger an automation when a keyboard was connected to or removed from an iPad. This frustrated some users, who interact with their iPad differently when a keyboard is connected—such as in a dock-style environment—and when they are using only the touch screen or an Apple Pencil.

Now, you can use Shortcuts to create automations based on whether a keyboard was connected, disconnected, or the keyboard connection state changed. This includes the “Set multitasking mode to” item. You might want to switch between Full Screen Apps and Windowed Apps when using your iPad without a keyboard. You’d have to set up two shortcuts: one would trigger when the keyboard was attached; the other when detached.

Relearn and persist the menu bar

In iPadOS 26, the menu bar had to be triggered either by swiping down from the top of the display or by hovering with a pointing device, at which point it would appear. It then hid, after a short delay, when it wasn’t in use or being hovered over.

In iPadOS 27, the default behavior appears similar, but there are two significant changes:

  • The app name always appears on the far-left side of the menu bar, at the upper-left corner of the screen.
  • To unfurl the menu bar, tap or drag over the app name.

Along with that new behavior, you can also opt to have the menu bar remain in place, persistent at all times. Go to Settings > Multitasking & Gestures, then disable Automatically Show and Hide Menu Bar.

Perform magic tricks with Apple Pencil

Siri AI on iPads that support it can extract text from notes written freehand with an Apple Pencil. These are indexed, and thus searchable.

In the Notes app, you can use Image Wand to turn a sketch you make with an Apple Pencil into a photorealistic image with Apple Intelligence.

Resize iPhone apps

iPadOS 27 fills a missing piece in Windowed Apps, the default setting that lets you resize app windows or use them in full-screen mode. iPhone apps that haven’t been developed as universal apps for both iOS and iPadOS still floated in their own fixed-size window.

iPhone apps released for iOS 27 automatically gain the capability to be resized in iPadOS 27, just as they can work at different sizes on different iPhone models.

Tag: iPadOS 27
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Where to Find Apple Intelligence in Each App

by Chris Smith

In the iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 updates, Apple expanded the use of Apple Intelligence across more apps and added features to apps that already had some Apple Intelligence support. Apple Intelligence is designed to synthesize information, like creating summaries, as well as generate stuff, such as text or images. Some of the elements are distinctly more useful than others.

Where to look for Apple Intelligence in individual apps:

  • Calendar and Reminders: Enter text that is more freeform in nature than rigidly structured in Calendar or Reminders, and the apps offer suggestions for structured data replacement.
  • Camera: Visual Intelligence is integrated as a Siri option in Camera alongside Photo and Video. With Siri selected, pointing the camera at certain items, like food, a restaurant receipt, or an event’s details, will result in a prompt you can tap. You can also tap the Siri button to analyze what’s in the view.
  • Mail: Mail offers suggestions as you type to insert information from other apps and libraries, such as photos, or to take action, like creating an entry in Notes.
  • Messages: Messages makes a suggestion when it thinks it makes sense to insert something from another app, like a photo.
  • Notes: After making a sketch with an Apple Pencil on an iPad in Notes, you can use Image Wand to make it photorealistic.
  • Passwords: The Passwords app scans for weak or compromised passwords at websites that support Apple’s method for automated password updates, then offers to fix those passwords for you.
  • Photos: Photos improves its Clean Up feature to provide much better generative image replacement. It adds two new Apple Intelligence tools: Extend, to extend the borders of an image, and Reframe, which allows slightly changing the point of view and perspective of an image.
  • Phone: While on a call, Phone may suggest contextually appropriate information, like a flight number when you call an airline.
  • Safari: You can have Safari automatically organize tabs, bookmarks, and Reading Lists into a grouping within a tab group. Keep tabs (ha, ha) on changes to webpages with Notify Me, which lets you describe what you want to monitor and have it automatically checked at a recurring interval.
  • Shortcuts: You can describe what you want via Siri AI in Shortcuts, and the app will attempt to write a shortcut for you.

Two more sit outside the apps themselves: Siri AI across the system, and Visual Intelligence on whatever is on your screen.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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What to Ask Siri AI: Examples That Actually Work

by Kevin Hollington

Once you invoke Siri using any of the many methods, you can start asking questions or asking Siri to perform tasks.

There’s a little nuance to how Siri answers. If you type your query in, for example, a Search or Ask field, then as you type—just as with previous versions—Spotlight finds local files and apps, images in Photos, tasks from Reminders, contact cards, App Store matches, and so forth. These start to display immediately.

If Siri identifies a search that appears Spotlight-focused, it presents a blue search button in the lower-right corner on an iPhone or iPad; on a Mac, there’s no indicator. More exact matches offer a suggestion as a completion after a long dash in gray text. If you type photoshop on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop installed, you see “photoshop — Adobe Photoshop 2025.a…” with everything after photoshop in gray.

However, if you type a question, more words, or something ambiguous, “— Ask Siri” appears in gray. On an iPhone or iPad, the search button turns into an arrow button—an Ask button, we assume. Tap the arrow button or, on a Mac, press Return, to trigger a Siri response to what you typed.

On all three kinds of devices, a Show Results button with overlapping icons—representing the kinds of items found—may appear below the Siri field. On the Mac, we saw it appear briefly before showing a scrolling results list as with Spotlight.

This automatic recognition of your query type means you don’t have to think about how you formulate a search or question: type what you want and let Siri figure it out. If the results list for a search doesn’t suffice, elaborate on what you’re asking.

You can broadly ask Siri these kinds of things:

  • Find something or analyze something on my device or in my personal information that’s available on this device, like text in Notes, events in Calendar, text recognized in Photos, and so on. (See how Siri AI and Spotlight merged.)
  • Provide me an answer about something that doesn’t necessarily include any of my personal data, or may not need to.
  • Make me an image of something I describe.

That’s all very general. What are specific kinds of queries you might make? Remember that the data has to exist for Siri to answer. We rely on a third-party email client, so Siri seems to have limited access to our email stores for now. But nearly everything else we do is stored in and synced by iCloud.

Here are a handful of examples of the wide range of questions you can ask and commands you can make, as the list is effectively endless:

  • What movie am I thinking of? It has Harry Lime in it. As you may have found with other chatbots, Siri can take a small amount of factual information and work like a memory aid by filling in the gaps, or asking clarifying questions. (Answer: The Third Man.)
  • Summarize my conversation last week with *name*. We found this particularly useful because, in testing, Siri did seem to figure out the most important things talked about, provide a solid analysis of the topics, and link to individual messages.
  • Start a timer for *time units. You can specify any time in any units. We tried 13 1/2* and it was interpreted correctly.
  • How many times did I go out for lunch this year? Siri pulled information from one of our calendars but also from a shared calendar used by a spouse. It also didn’t necessarily identify things that weren’t labeled “lunch” but were midday meal dates.
  • How do I clean a toilet that has a seemingly permanent stain inside the bowl? Siri can consult external sources and stuff that’s in its outboard LLM brain in the cloud to give you ideas for what to try.
  • Create an album containing all the images that I took in June 2024. Siri adds an album to Photos, and provides a link you can click to view that album in Photos.
  • Did I receive a birthday party invitation recently? Siri gave one of us a summary derived from a mix of emails and messages, correctly identifying two recent invitations for events that had already passed, while noting that it saw nothing upcoming.
  • What are some times I have nothing scheduled between 10 and noon next week? Siri offers a list of days in which that condition is true, but also shows the conflicts that impinge on that range on some days.
  • How do I feel about *person*? This is a question you might ask to test out the way Siri AI “thinks,” and we were surprised to find that it did a great job at accurately, if effusively, summarizing our interactions with a person by looking at email, messages, and other cues.
  • Make a picture of a nice lasagna dinner in a photorealistic style. While we have all sorts of feelings about this, it’s definitely something you can do. (See the Apple Intelligence features to skip.)

One of us attended a 60th birthday party recently, where former officemates regaled attendees with the celebrant’s early use of voice-recognition software. He had trained it so he could say “paste”—or rather, “Paste. Paste. PASTE!!!”—to perform that command and so on. The wits in the office would walk by and yell “erase hard drive! OK! Approve! OK!”

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27
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How to Install iOS 27 and iPadOS 27

by Stacey Butler

You don’t want to upgrade without a backup from the last state of your iPhone or iPad on hand. You can create a fresh backup via iCloud or by connecting to a Mac or Windows PC.

Back up with iCloud

Your easiest path to a backup is via iCloud. Not only is it faster and simpler, but Apple also provides better support for restoring to your device if needed.

If it’s your first time making an iCloud backup, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > iCloud Backup.
  2. Enable Back Up This iPhone or Back Up This iPad.
  3. Tap Back Up Now.

If you aren’t already making iCloud Backups, you should have at least as much available storage at iCloud+ as the size of your device’s data set, excluding iCloud Photos. That may require upgrading your iCloud+ plan from, say, 200 GB to 2 TB. You can estimate what space you need by looking at Settings > General > About > iPhone or iPad Storage.

If you already have iCloud Backup enabled, go to the iCloud Backup section and tap Back Up Now.

Your iPhone or iPad shows a Backing Up label and a Cancel Backup link while the backup is in progress. A bar shows an “Estimating time remaining” message until all changes are collected, at which time it shows a rough countdown and a progress bar.

When the backup is successfully completed, you see “Last successful backup” with the current time or a moment ago. You can now proceed.

Back up with a Mac

While iCloud might be best, you can also back your iPhone or iPad up using a Mac. Start by connecting your device with a USB to a Mac unless you’ve already enabled Wi-Fi syncing and prefer that method.

To enable Wi-Fi syncing, you first connect with USB. Then, after selecting the device in the Finder’s sidebar, check the “Show this Device when on Wi-Fi” box in the General view and click Apply.

To back up to a Mac:

  1. Click your device in Finder’s sidebar.
  2. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
  3. On the device’s General tab in the Finder, select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this Mac.”
  4. Click Back Up Now.

The General tab also shows the time of last iCloud backup for a connected device.

Back up to a Windows PC

Apple offers the Apple Devices app for Windows, which enables backups as easy as those offered on a Mac. First, install Apple Devices before proceeding. Next, follow these steps:

  1. Connect your iPhone or iPad to your PC with a USB cable.
  2. Open Apple Devices.
  3. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
  4. Select General in the lefthand sidebar in Apple Devices.
  5. Select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this computer.”
  6. Click Back Up Now.

Install the upgrade

With a backup in hand, you can now install iOS 27 or iPadOS 27. Here’s how:

  1. Go to Settings > General > Software Update.
  2. Tap either Install Now or Download and Install.

You may be prompted to offload some apps if your device lacks enough storage to handle the upgrade. Offloading an app deletes the app, but not its data, from your device. After the update completes, the apps are reinstalled automatically.

It usually takes from about 10 to 30 minutes for your device to complete the steps necessary to verify, install, and restart. However, in case of delays or problems, you should plan on it taking up to a couple of hours.

The verification can take a considerable time when huge numbers of users are installing all at once, such as on release day. You may want to upgrade your devices in the evening or on a weekend.

Be sure to keep your iPhone or iPad plugged in while the upgrade is underway to avoid an interruption.

Your device may feel very hot to the touch, sometimes even uncomfortably so, during the installation and restore, as your iPhone or iPad works at full bore.

After the upgrade is complete, your device has restarted, and you’ve entered your passcode, the operating system walks you through a few screens describing major changes.

You may also be asked for preferences you chose before in previous upgrades, such as Light Mode, Dark Mode, or Automatic. During this process, you may also be asked to allow your device to send analytics to Apple and some reporting to third-party developers. I tend to allow Apple and disallow developers for privacy reasons.

When this process is done, you’re ready to use iOS 27 or iPadOS 27.

Optimizing search and Siri

On a device with Apple Intelligence support, you can’t access all features until “optimization” is complete. This may take a serious amount of time. While underway, a message appears near the top of Settings. (During testing, this remained in place on a test phone with almost no personal data on it for over a day.)

For more on what that indexing enables, see what Siri AI means for your iPhone and iPad.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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How to Reduce Liquid Glass Transparency in iOS 27

by Tyler Stephen

Few interface changes Apple has made have been more criticized than their introduction of Liquid Glass in their version 26 operating system releases; few have been more praised than bringing a full-featured windowing environment to iPadOS 26.

Apple has learned from both changes and added maturity to them. Liquid Glass can now be practically disabled—almost turned off with Reduce Transparency—while the iPad received many more minor changes that are welcome, but not critical.

The introduction of Liquid Glass across Apple’s 26 releases of their operating systems elicited a lot of responses. A whole lot. It’s hard to know how hated this new interface approach was, but given how quickly Apple backed off from it, I would have to say a lot—particularly in iOS and iPadOS, where the translucency of Liquid Glass made it hard to find interface elements and read text.

Apple reacted by adding a feature in iOS 26.1/iPadOS 26.1 to reduce its impact by letting you switch between Clear, which was the original flavor of Liquid Glass, to Tinted, which reduced translucency by a fair amount, but not to zero.

In iOS 27/iPadOS 27, Apple switched up their approach, replacing the binary option with a slider from (now lowercase) clear to tinted, along with a preview of how it looks against interface elements.

If you want to go down to as close to zero Liquid Glass as possible, Reduce Transparency is still available, as described below.

Pick from more clear to more tinted

When you upgrade to iOS 27 or iPadOS 27, the last stages of the installation present a new screen that lets you choose to adjust Liquid Glass using a slider. If you don’t make the adjustment at that moment, you can do so later, or change your initial choice. Go to Settings > Appearance > Liquid Glass.

This new screen offers a slider you can drag from the left edge, which Apple describes as “More Clear” (most Liquid Glass effect) across a range to the right: “More Tinted” (most opaque). Apple makes it easy to visualize by providing a scrollable preview that shows Liquid Glass elements overlaid on a webpage with images and text.

At the More Clear setting, you can hardly read—or even find—the button and field over text and an image. The midway point is better, but still not ideal. More Tinted provides enough contrast for legibility. To me, this looks like what an interface designer would show an executive, expecting the executive to pick the most opaque option. Apple’s leadership didn’t do that for 26.0. In 26.1, we got a binary choice; in 27, a range of choices.

You can’t change the Liquid Glass intensity when either of the next two options is enabled. When you attempt to change the Liquid Glass setting, you’re told that Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast must be disabled. You can tap Turn Off.

Remove even more transparency

Apple separately offers two Accessibility settings that affected Liquid Glass in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. In the 27 releases, only one of the two has any real impact:

  • Reduce Transparency: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size and enable Reduce Transparency. This flattens Liquid Glass, removing transparency and providing an almost identical look to iOS 18/iPadOS 18. The level of Liquid Glass you have enabled doesn’t have an effect.
  • Increase Contrast: Use Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast to bump up the difference in tones. In iOS 27/iPadOS 27, the difference appears slight, where it was sharply distinct in the previous releases.
Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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How to Set Up Screen Time and Parental Controls in iOS 27

by Stacey Butler

Screen Time was created to let parents and guardians set policies for children that were automatically enforced by Apple’s operating systems. No matter what device a child used that was logged in to the same Apple Account, Screen Time restrictions would remain the same. In practice, not so much, and it remains to be seen how well this Apple-described redesign will improve that consistency.

Screen Time controls require that you set up a Child Account, which has to be part of Family Sharing. In the past, I know that parents have sometimes created regular accounts for their children or faked their birth dates to make them older out of frustration with Screen Time and other features that didn’t work as described.

A new tool for parents helps guide them in choosing apps they want their children to have access to.

Work with Ask to Browse

Apple already offered an Ask to Buy option, which let a kid send a request to the account’s owner in the Family Sharing group when they want to make an App Store purchase or download a free app. Ask to Browse builds on that, requiring that child request access to any website they haven’t previously been granted permission to use, or that a parent hadn’t already added to a list of acceptable sites.

The request is sent via Messages to the adult owner of the Family Sharing group and any other adult designated as Parent/Guardian. The parent or guardian can then tap or click Decline or Approve.

Set time per category

The previous Screen Time controls for setting how much time apps and other resources could be used were difficult to manage. The new ones, synced across all platforms, let a parent set Time Allowances, with separate settings for weekdays and weekends. Apple has a recommended maximum based on age that they developed in conjunction with child-development experts, they say.

Time Allowances define the total screen time permitted per day, and then are divided up into maximum amounts by category: Entertainment, Games, Social Media, and All Others. Parents can further create time windows within the days during which some categories aren’t available. Apple’s own example is to turn off the Entertainment, Games, and Social Media categories during school hours.

This overhauled approach also gives parents a sort of dashboard for each child. They can see current usage stats. That’s also where a child’s access can be paused—i.e., cut off entirely for the moment—or they can be granted unlimited use for the rest of the day, or until a parent revokes that.

Apple has also widened what gets blurred for children in this release, which is covered in how iOS 27 blurs gore and violence.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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iOS 27 and iPadOS 27: Which Devices Can Upgrade

by Moses Johnson

iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 have minimum hardware requirements. You won’t be able to upgrade any iPhone or iPad that isn’t a supported model. There are further limitations to using Apple Intelligence, which requires certain processor features and applies only to a subset of iPhones and iPads that can install iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.

Check your iPhone for compatibility

You can upgrade to iOS 27 on any of these iPhone series or models, the same as with iOS 26:

  • iPhone 11 series or later
  • iPhone XS series
  • iPhone SE (2nd generation or later)

If you’re not sure which iPhone model you have, go to Settings > General > About and check the Model Name entry.

Check your iPad for compatibility

iPadOS 27 will install on these models of iPads, with their minimum generation noted for each, the same list as with iPadOS 26:

  • iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd generation and later)
  • iPad Pro 11-inch (1st generation and later)
  • iPad Air (3rd generation and later, including M2)
  • iPad (8th generation and later)
  • iPad mini (5th generation and later)

If you’re not sure which generation your iPad is, look at Settings > General > About > Model Name.

Check whether you can use Apple Intelligence

Your device must meet minimum hardware requirements to use Apple Intelligence, which is interleaved more thoroughly in apps and in the system in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 than in previous releases. That includes the upgrade to Siri, now called Siri AI. To use Apple Intelligence and Siri AI you need:

  • An iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone Air, or any iPhone 16 or 17 model
  • An iPad mini from 2024 or later (A17 Pro)
  • Any iPad with an M1 or later processor

iPad models with an Apple silicon M-series chip are the 11-inch iPad Pro, 3rd generation and later; the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, 5th generation and later; and the iPad Air, 5th generation and later.

Several features need Apple Intelligence, and thus a supported iPhone or iPad—such as Spatial Reframing in Photos, or Call Context for surfacing relevant information when using the Phone app.

Siri AI’s most advanced on-device version, which includes improved dictation and an “expressive” custom Siri voice, has even higher minimum requirements. Those features are available only on:

  • iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max
  • iPads with an M4 and later and 12 GB or more of unified memory, which excludes the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro models with 256 GB and 512 GB of storage from 2024

If your device is on the list, installing iOS 27 is the next step.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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Photos in iOS 27: Keywords, Shared Albums and More

by Emily Long

In iOS 27, Apple has improved Photos in major and minor ways: improved and expanded AI-based editing tools, better results and metadata access, upgrades to iCloud Shared Album, and the ability to extract video frames.

Organization and metadata

It took many years, but you can finally apply keywords to media in the Photos app on an iPhone and iPad. Huzzah? (Keywords are a useful way to link images for searching and organization.) However, you can still only apply keywords to items one at a time, as opposed to singly or in selections of two or more on a Mac. To add keywords, tap the info button, then tap Add Keywords.

When you make a selection by tapping the Select button in the upper-right corner of any multiple-item view in Photos, a new Show Selected button appears at the bottom. Tap it, and it reveals just the items you chose. You can adjust the selection or view the images and videos in a carousel. Tap Deselect All to remove the current selection.

Apple adds two new albums in Collections > Utilities. Captured by Me contains images or videos you created using any iPhone or iPad, such as via the Camera app or by taking a screenshot. The Identity Documents album uses machine learning (not Apple Intelligence) to collect scans or photos of personally identifying documents. (Identity Documents hasn’t yet appeared for me in iOS.)

You’re missing a star

Apple had said you would be able to rate photos and videos on a 1-to-5 scale, typical of other photo-management apps, but this was coming to Apple’s ecosystem for the first time. This would add nuance to the existing favorite option, which is either on or off. However, it hasn’t appeared.

Shared Albums

Apple hasn’t shaken up iCloud Shared Albums in several years, and it has notable omissions, such as the ability to share higher-resolution versions.

In iOS 27/iPadOS 27 (and on macOS 27 and at iCloud.com), you have access to several new features. However, you must first upgrade an album: select the album in Collections > Shared Albums, tap the More button, then tap Upgraded Shared Album. This may take some time—minutes or longer—depending on the size of the items in the library and your internet connection.

After upgrading, you have access to the following:

  • Full-resolution photos and videos are now supported across all common formats.
  • You can filter by photos or videos. Tap the Filter button, then tap Media Types.
  • There’s a Create Shared Album option for any existing album. Tap the More button, then tap Create Shared Album.
  • Albums can be set to expire after 30 days, but only when created. After creating a Shared Album from an existing album or by tapping the Add button in the Collections > Shared Albums view, enable Make Album Temporary.
  • You can create an upload link that allows anyone—not just people with access to the album—to upload images. With the album selected, tap the Share button, tap “Only invited people can join,” and choose Anyone with the Link. (This is similar to other kinds of sharing across iOS 27/iPadOS 27).
  • A recent activity log lets you see changes made to the album, including emoji reactions. (This doesn’t yet appear to be in place.)

Other Photos additions

Three other changes, two new and one set of improvements, may be of interest.

You can extract a frame from a paused video to save as an image. Tap the More button and choose Save Video Frame.

Photos often decides to pause syncing to iCloud to avoid draining the battery, even when the battery is quite full. You can now go to Settings > Apps > Photos > Sync Immediately and choose For Today. This prioritizes syncing instead of preserving battery life for the remainder of the calendar day. If Low Power Mode or Low Data Mode are enabled, Photos will still pause until those modes are turned off, such as by recharging the phone for the former.

Slideshows can now be built from any album or even a selection of media, rather than relying on memories.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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The Action Button Feature Apple Promised and Hasn’t Shipped

by Dave Johnson

Accessibility is a catch-all term for a large number of features, apps, and adjustments that Apple designs to improve access to kinds of things that may be harder for some people, whether due to motor limitations, eyesight or hearing, or the language they speak.

Many of these features can benefit a much larger group of people than any narrowly defined as “disabled”; automatic, high-quality captioning of video content is a great example, as is having a voice read text aloud from webpages or describe images.

Apple’s key accessibility features for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 relate to describing things in a visual field, captioning, and understanding.

Act on what you see

Apple has offered three features independent of one another that have brought a lot to the table for accessibility for people with low vision or who are blind, as well as more generally:

  • VoiceOver: Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility feature, added to iPhone in 2009 and iPad in 2010, describes what’s on screen, such as buttons, interface elements, and text.
  • Magnifier: A Control Center item, Magnifier (from 2016 on iPhone and iPad) provides a toolbox full of options for your cameras—zoom, contrast, flashlight, capture, and more—which can make the tiny, low-contrast, and hard-to-see for whatever reason much easier to get a look at.
  • Visual Intelligence: This camera-based feature requires Apple Intelligence and first appeared in 2024 (in iOS 18.2, for select models). Visual Intelligence lets an iPhone identify objects, buildings, and other things, read text aloud, and more.

With iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, Apple has brought aspects of Visual Intelligence into the VoiceOver and Magnifier contexts.

You can use VoiceOver and enable a sub-feature that used to live only in Magnifier, called Live Recognition, to read aloud or provide a summary, details, or analysis of what it sees. You can set Live Recognition features at Settings > Accessibility > Live Recognition, though the features aren’t available unless you have VoiceOver enabled.

In Magnifier, if the Ask button isn’t present, go to Magnifier > Settings > Ask Magnifier > Show in Control Panel. Tap Ask, which triggers Live Recognition as well. For example, point it at a bill and ask it what the bill’s total is.

Where’s the Action, Apple?

Apple said in their accessibility preview press release in May 2026, before the June 2026 announcement of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, “With updates to Live Recognition, VoiceOver users can press the Action button on iPhone to quickly ask a question about what’s in the camera viewfinder and get a detailed response.” They also wrote, “Magnifier also works with the Action button so users can quickly ask questions and get answers.”

These options for the Action button haven’t appeared. I’ll update this information if and when the Action button function appears for VoiceOver or Magnifier.

Apple also rebuilt Accessibility Reader, added generated captions for any uncaptioned video, and taught Voice Control to take plain descriptions of what you want tapped. Those are covered in the Apple Intelligence accessibility features.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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