3 Great Photo App Tips for iPhone, iPad, & Mac That You May Have Overlooked

The Photos app is a major part of the Apple ecosystem, providing a ton of powerful capabilities for managing and editing photos whether you’re using Photos on iPhone, Mac, or iPad. While you may already be familiar with some great tips like editing photos for color, cropping, applying filters, and creating folders for your photos, there are a variety of lesser known features that are super useful in the Photos app.

We’re covering three of the most useful overlooked features that are available for Photos app for iPhone, Mac, and iPad.

1: Copy & Paste Edits for Bulk Image Editing Made Easy

Making edits to your photos is a one of the most useful functions built into the Photos app for iPhone, Mac, and iPad, but did you know you don’t have to individually edit each photo you take? Instead, you can use a copy and paste edits feature to make edits to one image, and then carry over those edits to as many other photos as you’d like to apply them to.

This feature is the same on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, though how it works is slightly different for iOS & iPadOS compared to MacOS. Basically after you make edits to your picture in Photos app, do the following:

• On iPhone and iPad, select the (…) button and choose “Copy Edits”, then select other photos you want to apply the edits to, select (…) again and choose “Paste Edits”
• On Mac, right-click (or got to the Edit menu) and choose “Copy Edits”, and then select other photos you want to apply the edits to, right-click again and choose “Paste Edits” (or go to the Edit menu and select Paste Edits there)

It’s that easy to apply edits to many photos, making bulk image editing an absolute breeze with Photos app whatever the platform is you’re accessing the app from.

2: Identify Objects, Plants, Flowers, & More

Did you know the Photos app is able to identify objects by using built-in machine learning and AI capabilities? Many people miss this feature, but it’s incredibly useful. You can identify everything from animals, to objects, plants, flowers, and more, just select to open the photo you wish to identify, and then choose the little sparkly leaf button.

This feature pairs really well with the iPhone in particular since you can use it while you’re on the go, out and about in the world. Surely you’ve come across a situation where you see something, perhaps a particular plant or flower, and you wonder “what on earth is that?” With iPhone, just take a photo of the thing you wish to identify, and then open it in Photos app and tap on that little sparkly leaf icon to identify what it is.

3: Select & Copy Text from Photos

Modern versions of Photos app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, support a super useful feature called Live Text which allows you to select and copy text from within a photo.

For example, perhaps you took a picture of a sign, or a menu, or a document, you can open that picture in Photos app, and then select the text to copy it, and paste it elsewhere.

This feature works the same on Photos app for every Apple device, simply just open the photo, then tap and select the text, and choose to Copy.

You can then paste the copied text where ever you’d like; into Notes app, Pages, Messages, Mail, anywhere you can paste text.

If you’ve been using iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a while, you may already be familiar with this feature, but many people are unaware this capability exists. Give it a try, it works really well, and you

–

If you enjoyed these tips, don’t miss out on our large archives with tons of Photos app tips and tricks here.

Do you have a favorite lesser known tip or trick for the Photos app? Share it with us in the comments!