The Photos app comes standard on every iPhone and iPad. It’s an app that collects all the photos and videos you’ve taken and includes features to organize, quickly find, and edit your photos. In addition to normal photos, the app also contains all kinds of other images such as screenshots, panoramas, timelapses, portraits and more. In this guide you will discover how the app works and what functions it has.
- Tabs
- Recognize people
- Edit photos and videos
- Other functions
Tabs in the Photos app
An important part of the Photos app can be found at the bottom: the tabs. You can use this to navigate through the different sections of the app. Below you can read what can be found on the different tabs and what you can do with them.
- Library
- For you
- Albums
- Search
Photos tab
The first tab is called ‘Library’. Here you will find all your photos in a large overview. They are not sorted by type, but only by date. In this tab you can choose between Years, Months, Days and All photos. If you tap one of these options, the photos will be grouped so that you can go to a specific moment more quickly. Using clever tricks, Apple knows where the most photos were taken per group, so you will see that there.
Tip: You can zoom in and out with two fingers to enlarge and reduce the photos shown.
For you tab
In the For you tab you will find all kinds of fun moments. You’ll see activities in shared albums and memories created by the iPhone itself. You will also receive suggestions for sharing photos with specific people. With the help of facial recognition, the iPhone knows which person is in the photo. Every now and then the iPhone makes a nice retrospective of photos. For example, if you have been on holiday, you will receive a short video with some photos you took there. You can also export it and share it with your friends by tapping it. Owners who photograph their pets can expect memories along the lines of “Loyal four-legged friends”.
Albums tab
If you like a well-organized photo collection, you’ll spend a lot of time in the Albums tab. Here you will find your photos sorted in all kinds of ways. At the top you will find the recent photos and the most recent albums. If you scroll further down, you will find standard folders such as Selfies, Live Photos and Portrait. This helps you quickly find a certain type of photo. In the tab you will also find all shared albums of you and your friends, plus a map with locations where you have taken photos. If you want to go a little further with organizing your photos, you can combine albums into folders in the Photos app on your Mac.
Search tab
It’s not strictly necessary to put all your photos in albums. Thanks to the smart search functions of the Photos app, you can find photos very quickly. The iPhone indexes all your photos by date, location and content. For example, you can search for a dog, tree or the name of a specific person. Do you no longer remember where a photo was taken, but when? Then you can search by date. By applying multiple filters you can quickly find that one photo from 2021 in Paris with a bicycle in it.
Recognize people in the Photos app
The Photos app knows what you look like and that includes your immediate family and friends, if you want it to. This works based on facial recognition and it works surprisingly well. Once you have pointed out the person in question in a number of photos, the iPhone can now recognize this person itself. Every once in a while you can confirm new photos if your iPhone isn’t sure who it is.
This is how you view people and add names:
- Open the Albums tab.
- Tap the People album.
- Tap a photo you want to assign a name to.
- At the top, tap Add name.
- Enter the name or select it from the list.
If you see an error on the iPhone, you can easily correct it. You can indicate this when rating photos. Did your iPhone assign a photo to the wrong person without asking? Press and hold your finger on this photo and tap Not this person, which will appear in red text.
Once you have given some faces a name, you can tap the heart at the bottom right of each photo in the overview. This makes a person a favorite so they appear larger at the top of the album. Don’t like the thumbnail photo in the overview? Fortunately, you can also quickly adjust this. Find a photo you like, hold your finger on it and choose Take Main Photo.
It is good to know that your iPhone or iPad only indexes photos when the device is charging and locked. It takes a lot of computing power to index, and this way you won’t notice it.
Edit photos and videos
You can also use the Photos app to edit photos. The most common operations can be found here. This way you can apply lighting and colors, use a filter or crop and shorten.
This is how you edit a photo or video:
- Open the photo or video you want to edit.
- Tap Edit at the top right.
- Scroll through the editing options and adjust the settings as necessary.
- No idea what to adjust? Tap the magic wand for an automatic edit.
- Tap Done.
You can also provide the photo with a filter. To do this, follow steps 1 and 2 above, then tap the three overlapping circles at the bottom of the screen. Choose a filter and see the effect!
You can also edit multiple photos at once in the Photos app. You can read more tips about editing photos here:
- Rotate photos on iPhone and iPad: this is how you do it
- This is how you can delete duplicate photos from your iPhone in no time
- This trick allows you to separate an object from photos from the background
- This is how you can adjust the exposure of photos on iPhone and iPad
- Turn off featured photos and memories from the Photos app
Other features of the Photos app
The Photos app is packed with smaller features that we don’t want to deprive you of. Below we have listed a number of fun and useful functions:
- Swipe up on a photo to see the location and people.
- Swipe down on a photo to quickly close it.
- Hold your iPhone horizontally in the Photos tab for a better view.
- Press and hold your finger on the Photos app icon and view photos from a year ago.
- If you accidentally delete a photo or video, view the Recently Deleted album.
- Ask Siri to show photos, for example: “Hey Siri, show photos from San Francisco.”
- Press and hold your finger on a photo to see the Live Photo.
The Photos app is also available on Mac. Read all about the Photos app for Mac in our separate guide.
