iOS 27 AI Photo Tools Challenge Google and Samsung
Apple has been watching Google and Samsung pull ahead in AI photo editing for years. However, this fall, it plans to close the gap in a big way.
Apple is planning a major overhaul of the built-in photo-editing features for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, leaning heavily on artificial intelligence to better compete with Android devices.
The Photos app in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 will have an Apple Intelligence Tools section when editing an image. Options will include Extend, Enhance, and Reframe.
Each tool does something distinct. Extend generates additional image content beyond the original photo frame, filling in the scenery when changing an image’s crop. This tool supports expanding an image’s edges with zoom gestures. For example, someone could take a close-up photo of a landmark and use Extend to fill in the surrounding scenery.
Enhance uses AI to automatically tweak colour, lighting, and other image parameters, similar to how the auto editing feature works now. Reframe, meanwhile, lets users change the perspective of an image after it’s captured, particularly for spatial photos.
In addition, the new iOS 27 AI photo editing tools run directly on-device. Processing typically takes only a few seconds while keeping data private. That approach fits Apple’s longstanding privacy-first position.
iOS 27 AI Photo Editing Tools: The Catch
Not everything is ready. Development of the new photo editing features hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. The Extend and Reframe tools don’t perform reliably during internal testing. This could lead Apple to delay or scale back the features depending on improvements to its underlying models.
That reliability gap matters because Apple already has one AI photo editing tool, and it is not exactly spotless. Clean Up, Apple’s existing AI tool, still has issues even a year and a half after launching. It removes unwanted objects from an image, but it’s not as good at filling in missing information as tools from Samsung and Google.
Therefore, Apple has to get these new tools right. Adding more features that produce inconsistent results would only deepen the perception that the company is behind.
The competitive gap is real. Google already offers Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and generative image expansion on Pixel devices and some Android ones. Samsung, meanwhile, has been keeping camera hardware the same but offering improvements via AI editing and upscaling.
The ability to extend photos has been available in Photoshop for nearly three years. Apple was always going to bring these features to market, but the question has always been timing.
iOS 27 is set to be unveiled at WWDC on June 8. In addition to the new photo editing features, the update will reportedly include major improvements to Siri and a concerted effort to improve performance, battery life, and stability.
As a result, the iOS 27 AI photo editing tools represent something bigger than three new buttons in the Photos app. They are Apple’s clearest public acknowledgement that Android got ahead, and that this fall is the moment to fight back.
