Photos: Complete Guide to iOS 13

 The Photos app is one of the iPhone and iPad's most critical applications, housing all the photographs you have taken and providing editing software to make those images even better.

Apple has been continuously developing the Photography app with machine learning and other technology over the last few years to display your photographs in different and creative ways so that you can do more than just view your pictures - you can relive your memories. IOS 13 is no exception and has a range of enhancements that make it more useful than ever for the Images app.

Updated Photos Tab Organization

In iOS 13, the main Images tab in the Photos app has been overhauled, with a new design that is intended to put your best photos in the middle and front. There are new options for showing all your images by day, month, and year, in addition to the iOS 12-style option to view all your photos.

Without the cruft, each of the time-based viewing solutions cuts out clutter, such as screenshots, receipt pictures, and redundant images, showing all of your best memories. In a tiled view, photos are shown with your best images showing as large squares surrounded by smaller related photos.

In the Images app, the Days view shows you the photos you've taken sorted by each day while the Months view shows photos grouped into events so that you can see at a glance the best sections of the month.

You can see subsections for each year in the View of Years. It will automatically flip through each month in the current year so you can get a summary of each month, but Apple has done something special in previous years. You'll see pictures taken during the same time of year when you tap into an older year, like 2018 or 2017.

So for instance, you'll see images that were taken in June 2017 if it's June and you tap the 2017 tab in June. In this view, tapping into a particular year flips over to the Month view, where you can further tap a target month, which then swaps to the Day view. In the Years view, you can also swipe a finger over the images to see a glimpse of main pictures from each month.

Apple highlights titles like venue, concert performances, holidays, and more in all of the pages, so you know where your pictures were taken.

The new Photos tab is different from the section introduced in iOS 12, "For You" For You also presents curated images, but the Photos tab organises them around particular dates, while For You focuses on aggregating material from different dates, such as beach days, trips, specific individuals, pets, and more.

For surfacing your best memories, both the latest Images tab and the For You view are fantastic, making the Photos app a great tool just for browsing your photo collection.

Autoplay Live Photos and Videos

Live photos and videos will be silently autoplayed in the new Photos tab, so you can see a snapshot of action in the Day view, which brings the Photos tab to life and makes it a more dynamic, enjoyable experience to browse through your pictures.

Extended Live Photos

When you have two or more Live Images taken within 1.5 seconds of each other in the Day view of the Photos tab, there is a new Live Photos feature that will play all at once as a short little video instead of just a fast animation.

Birthday Highlights

If you have their birthdays assigned to them in the Contacts app, Apple will show you pictures of the person in the For You" section of the Photos app for your contacts that you have photos of in the People album.

Screen Recordings Album

If you capture a screen recording in iOS 13, it will immediately be saved to a new Screen Recordings album, just as screenshots go to the Screenshots album.

Overhauled Interface editing

In iOS 13, Apple has updated the editing interface in Photos, which you can access whenever you click the Edit button on one of your files.

Instead of hiding editing tools in a set of small icons at the bottom of the image, iOS 13 puts them front and centre in a new slider that allows you to scroll through each choice for adjustment. It starts with the regular Auto Adjust, but you can select the unique change you need if you swipe to the left of the editing tools.

To see what the picture looks like before and after, you can tap each edit you are adding, so it's obvious what each of the modifications is doing. This new interface more closely resembles photo editing software from third parties and puts more tools right at the fingertips of iPhone users, making photo editing simpler for all.

In the Photos app, the editing tab has been changed to account for the new edit gui. The adjustment tools are front and centre when you open up edits, but if you tap the concentration circles icon on the left, you can get to Live Images adjustments where you can pick a new main photo.

There are philtre options on the right of the adjustment function, and next to that, crop and shift orientation options.

Intensity Slider

There's a slider for each editing method that lets you tweak the strength of the change, allowing for more controlled edits than before. So for example, to brighten or darken a picture, you can pick the 'Exposure' adjustment tool and then use the slider to get the desired effect quickly. Strength has precise numbers, so how much of an effect has been applied at a glance is easy to say.

New Editing Tools

Apple has added new tools for things such as vibrance change, white balance, sharpness, and more in addition to revamping the editing interface in Images. Below is a list of all the editing software available on iOS 13 for Photos:

• Auto
• Exposure
• Brilliance
• Highlights
• Shadows
• Contrast
• Brightness
• Black Point
• Saturation
• Vibrance
• Warmth
• Tint
• Sharpness
• Definition
• Noise Reduction
• Vignette

The auto cropping and auto straightening functions designed to make your images look better with just a tap have also been enhanced by Apple. You can use pinch to zoom while editing to see a photo's close-up information to get a closer look at just what edits are doing to a specific area in an image.

Filter Intensity Adjustments

While there are new editing tools available, there are also the philtres that Apple has long provided. Filters are more practical in iOS 13 because the philtre strength can be changed using a new slider feature.

High-Key Mono Lighting Effect

For Portrait Lighting, High-Key Mono, iOS 13 adds a new effect. High-Key Mono is a black and white effect similar to Stage Light Mono, but designed instead of a black one to add a white backdrop.

High-Key Mono Lighting is limited to the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR.

Portrait Lighting Adjustment Tools

With a new slider option in iOS 13, the Portrait Lighting effects applied to Portrait Mode images can be changed, enabling you to further customise the added lighting. It is designed to allow you to adjust the lighting intensity, which can alter the look of a portrait picture dramatically.

Portrait Lighting adjustment tools are limited to the ‌iPhone XS‌, XS Max, and XR.

Video Editing

Photo editing tools have been available in the Images app for quite some time, but many of the same tools are available for the first time in iOS 13 for video editing.

To adjust parameters such as exposure, contrast, saturation, brightness, and more, Apple offers editing software, plus there are built-in philtres that you can add. To get a fast change, you can also use the same Auto Adjust feature in videos that has long been available for pictures.

Video editing software, such as photo editing tools, feature sliders to monitor the strength of the changes so that the lighting, brightness, and other elements can be drastically or subtly modified, and video length adjustment tools continue to be available.

There are also tools to straighten a video, change the vertical alignment, adjust the horizontal alignment, rotate the video, alter the video's orientation and crop it.

None of these video editing tools were available in iOS 12, and iMovie or another video editing app have required these kinds of video edits in the past, but video editing is now as simple and straightforward as photo editing.

The Photos app will not be ideal for complex video edits where footage needs to be added or removed, but it will be a useful tool for quick tweaks that will be easy to use for even novice videographers.