- How the new Extend and Reframe tools work in iOS 27
- Where to find them and how to use each one
- Why you shouldn’t lean on them too hard
One of iOS 27’s flagship Photos features is the ability to extend and reframe your shots after the fact. Didn’t quite nail the composition in the moment? Apple Intelligence might be able to bail you out. Here’s how.
Widen the frame with Extend
Tap Tools from the Edit menu and choose Extend, or use the Crop tool and pinch outward with two fingers – the opposite of what you’re used to doing with crop. This shrinks the photo within its frame, leaving a blurred border around the edges. Hit Extend and Apple Intelligence fills that space in with its best guess at a realistic continuation of the background.
This isn’t magic, obviously – it’s generative image editing using what’s already in the frame as a prompt, then improvising the rest. When it works, it’s genuinely impressive, and it’s particularly good with simple backgrounds like sky or trees. If you cropped too tight when you shot the photo, Extend can rescue the composition or open up margins for printing or posting online.
Apple has built in some fairly firm limits: Extend is capped at 25% per side, and you can only apply it once per image. That tracks with what you’ll notice in practice – pinch out far enough and it’ll simply stop, or lock a particularly awkward edge out of the process altogether because it’s not a good candidate for extending. Once it’s done, tap the preview to flick between the original and extended versions and judge for yourself.
Shift the perspective with Reframe
Reframe sits in the same Tools menu and does something bolder: it changes the camera angle after you’ve already pressed the shutter, using the same spatial photo tech Apple uses for those Lock Screen photos you can tilt to view in a kind of pseudo-3D space.
Tap Reframe and the photo gets scanned briefly while it builds a spatial model of the scene, then you drag with one finger to shift the perspective, or use two fingers to pan, zoom, or rotate. It’s well suited to correcting a slightly off angle rather than staging a whole new shot, and like Extend, it only stretches so far – you can’t zoom out indefinitely or swing the perspective too dramatically.
Worth bearing in mind
Both tools require Apple Intelligence-capable hardware, so this starts with the iPhone 15 Pro – older iPhones won’t see the option at all. The process isn’t instant either, needing a stable internet connection to do its thing via Apple’s secure servers. Beta testers have had mixed results so far, with reports of artifacts and distorted faces cropping up, particularly on trickier subjects, so don’t be surprised if your results are hit and miss until Apple Intelligence is refined even further.
Finally, remember these tools are no substitute for framing the shot properly to begin with – and it has the potential to be a slippery slope where you’re potentially faking your own memories. You might end up with a treasured photo from a trip including buildings in the background that don’t actually exist in real life, so be mindful of those boundaries when using tools like this!
