The best take on Apple’s new AI tools in the Photos app.
Tyler Stalman on X:
When does a photo stop being a photo? Apple has been slow to adopt Al editing tools but at WWDC26 they dove in head first. They've always said that to them a photo is representation of a moment that really happened and these new tools built into the Photos app take a step away from that.
CLEANUP: It works great! Just like Photoshop's Generative Fill it's powerful, useful and leaves minimal digital artifacts, I love it. But as users become better able to seamlessly make major edits to personal photos, some kind of verification standard (like C2PA) becomes more important for Apple to support.
EXTEND: It works very well but this is a tool best left to third party apps. It completely invents huge areas of a scene, switching pants into shorts or adding people that don't exist. There are dozens of professional uses for that, like adding negative space for a design, but most of what we keep in the Photos app are memories and I believe Apple should always resist the temptation to allow casual users to meaningfully alter those memories without jumping through one or two hoops.
That said, it's incredibly useful for better fitting wallpaper images, or building out the corners of an image to straighten the horizon. I suggest Apple limit use in its non-pro apps to those features, and hand the powerful version of Extend over to the Photomator team.
REFRAME: It's a cool party trick, but I think it is a mistake to add it to the Photos app. It's like the end of The Prestige, or the Star Trek teleporter paradox. Even a small perspective adjustment means that the image is handed off to Private Cloud Compute, a new photo is generated that might look JUST LIKE your photo, but ultimately is now an Al generated image. Apple is great about protecting your data, so your original image is always preserved but I can just imagine a casual user excitedly going through and tweaking every image in their favourites album, only to regret it later (don't worry, you can always undo it).
And although the feature generally works well, a big camera move can significantly distort the subject.
Overall, I think Apple is withdrawing from the bank of trust that iPhone photo is always a true representation of what happened for relatively niche features. If I were on the Photos team, I would want to position the iPhone as the camera you can always trust. Google and Samsung can chase the wizbang features but I want iPhone photos to be the most trusted in the world, and we're gradually moving away from that.
That last paragraph is how I feel about AI photo editing for years; I didn’t think Apple would follow Google and Samsung and start tinkering with reality. Apple’s algorithms in Extend, Cleanup, and Reframe all work really well after having tested them myself, but there isn’t a single photo that I want to save because I know it’s not real.
The goal of photography was always to capture what the eye can see, not what the mind wants.