Be even more creative with photos and videos

Subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks to make snapping more fun

Apple’s machine learning efforts were already applied to your photo library in Sierra and iOS 10, enabling you to search for objects and certain kinds of scene without having to manually tag images in advance; the app recognises trees, beaches, cars, and many more things.

This feature gets even smarter in High Sierra and iOS 11, enabling you to search for sporting events, outdoor activities, ‘night out’, weddings, and many more events. The Memories feature now supports portrait playback, automatically reformatting its auto-generated movies to that orientation; in Apple’s examples at least, the app manages to keep the subject of photos and videos within the portrait frame.

The capabilities of Live Photos are enhanced too, with options to trim, mute, loop, and bounce. The loop option analyses a video to compute a seamless loop, according to Apple, while bounce plays some action and, upon reaching the end, plays the same frames backwards to the start, then repeats. Cue plenty of instant memes and animated GIFs. And, at last, you can choose which frame of a Live Photo’s movie component is used as the key photo.

Photos also includes an effect that mimics capturing a long exposure with a traditional camera, where moving objects such as water in a stream become softened. Apple demonstrated the kind of results you can achieve with this on a relatively static landscape with water running through it. Though the original Live Photo (see above left) looks relaxing, there’s a serene, dream-like quality to the water once the long exposure effect has been applied to the clip (see above right).