Photos App

Pictures you take with the Camera app and pictures you download and save to your device from email, text, web pages, and other sources, are stored and organized in the Photos app. From the Photos app, you can create albums and slideshows, edit pictures, share photos and albums, and much more.

How Photos organizes your pictures

Open the Photos app and look for the categories at the bottom of your screen. You can view your photos by Library, For You, Albums, or use the Search box to look for pictures by context, location, date, and more. The default categories are:

• Library groups your photos by Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. As you scroll through your pictures, videos will play a preview.

• For You displays collections of photos curated by iOS. You’ll find photos grouped by location and time, shared albums, groups of photos by themes, and more. For You will also make suggestions for editing pictures.
• Albums collects pictures in a bunch of different ways, including grouping people, locations, type of media, and more. You can also create any number of albums for yourself. Albums can be shared or viewed as slideshows.
• Open Search to type in search terms, like a person, city, landscape, or time period. Search automatically creates groups of search results you might want to view.

Photos in iCloud

You can choose to automatically upload your photos to iCloud in full resolution. To enable this feature, go to Settings > Account ID [your name] > iCloud > Photos, then turn on iCloud Photos. You may find that you run out of your 5GB of free iCloud storage quickly.

Photo Stream

Photo Stream syncs your last 30 days of photos to iCloud and other devices on your Apple account with Photo Stream enabled. After 30 days, the photos are removed from iCloud—and removed from the synced devices on your Apple account sharing the Photo Stream—but always remain on the original device (the iPhone or iPad used to take the photo originally).

Think of Photo Stream as a rolling 30-day period; today’s shots are added while photos from 31 days old and older are removed.

• You can’t use both iCloud storage and Photo Stream.
• Photo Stream will only store up to 1000 images.
• Your Photo Stream will only sync still photos, not Live Photos or videos.
• Photo Stream does not count against your iCloud storage limits.
• Photo Stream will only upload on Wi-Fi.

Albums

Albums are great for creating collections of photos and videos that you can easily view or share.

Creating a new album

1. Open Albums, tap , then choose a New Album or a New Shared Album.
2. Enter a name for the album and tap Save.
3. Select the photos, albums, or people you want to add.
4. When finished, tap Done.

Adding photos to an existing album

1. Open a photo or video.
2. Tap Share , swipe up to reveal more options, then tap Add to Album  .
3. Select the album you want to add to or create a new album.

Playing slideshows from an album

Albums are great for slideshows. Create albums that collect your favorite photos from vacations or other fun events, and play them on your device or cast them to a big screen.

1. Open any Photos album and open any photo.
2. Tap the Share  button.
3. Scroll down and choose the Slideshow  option.
4. Tap the screen while the slideshow is playing, then tap Options to display controls for theme, music, repeating, and speed.

Sharing photos and albums

Tapping the Share button brings up a bunch of options, including shortcuts to:

• People you frequently message.
• Apps, like email or Reminders.
• AirDrop to another nearby Apple device.
• Messages to include the photo in a text message.
• iCloud to send the image or collection to iCloud.
• Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr to share on social media.
• Use as Wallpaper to set as your device’s background image.
• Print to make a paper copy.
• Set as a Watch Face on the Apple Watch.
• Copy Photo allows you to paste the photo somewhere else like the Notes app.

Searching your photos

Photos gives you several options for searching, including using Siri and voice commands. You can, for instance, tell Siri to “show me photos from San Diego” or “show me photos of mountains.” Siri will use location information stored with the photos as well as photo recognition technology to find and display all the photos on your device that match. If no photos are found, Siri may offer to show you matches from the Internet.

Tap Search  to automatically display some default collections iOS organizes for you, including:

• Favorites. Photos you have favorited .
• Places. Photos grouped by location data.
• Categories. Photos grouped by the animals, places, or things within the photos.

You can use search to type in keywords including months, cities, and states—even street names.