I have been thinking about this topic since the iPhone 16 Introduction and and it became more solidified as I started using the iPhone 16 Pro a week later. When I listened to NIlay Patel and John Gruber talk about photographer on episode 409 of The Talk Show, it became a must that I share some thoughts on where photography has gone after 17 years of iPhone.
iPhone Photography has become too complicated.
This coming from someone who calls their primary camera a Canon R5 and the every day carry in my messenger bag a Leica Q2. However, I have a dirty secret. As soon as I became fluid enough in photography to understand how to take a photograph, I gave it up and switched my camera to auto. I’ve been shooting full frame manual cameras for 15 years and taking photos for 25 but I turn on my $3500 Canon R5 attached to a $2500 lens and I press the shutter button. I’m not leaving much on the table. Modern auto focus, white balance and sensors are really good. I sometimes regret not dialing aperture up a bit and boosting ISO or matching shutter speed to the race car or using the amazing AF zones on the R5 but I don’t need to. I rarely miss the shot and photos are good enough for my scrap book.
iPhone is not my lifestyle camera. It’s the camera I use to send a selfie to my wife, a photo of my dinner to a friend, a barcode of an item I’m price checking or a picture of a can of beer.
Camera Control is great because I didn’t have an action button last year so I click a button, camera opens every time and I use that same button to snap a photo. iPhone usually gets the shot I want no matter what setting I’m on and auto focus Is fast and rarely makes a mistake.
iPhone takes great photos when those photos are viewed on a smartphone sort of like MiniDV footage looks awesome on a Sony Trinitron CRT but looks like garbage on today’s 4K televisions. I don’t like iPhone photos but I never had to like their photos because these are throwaway images that I never look at again.
The issue with iPhone 16 Photography is the entire experience is too complicated. A few highlights:
There are 4 ways to open camera on iOS 18 (Lock Screen, action button, camera control, swipe to left)
Camera Settings in iOS Settings has:
- 21 Options / Settings and hundreds of nested settings that are completely overwhelming to anyone that is not an uber nerd
- 15 Photographic styles
- 5 Cameras (4 rear + 1 selfie)
- RAW, HEIF, JPEG, ProRAW, ProRes, JPEG-XL and more image formats
- Hundreds of combinations of resolution / frames per second and formats
Then the camera app has:
- Depth of field
- Auto focus
- White balance
- Aspect ratio
- Tone control
- Delay timer
- Live Photos
- Flash On/Off/Auto
- Personal / Shared photo libraries
- Editing functions for compressed and raw images
- Grids
- QR Code scanning
- Text Detection
- Visual Lookup
- Slow mo
…okay I’m going to stop there but you get the point. It’s incredibly complicated to take a photo today on iPhone. One may argue that sure you can still open camera and snap a photo but the issue persists that this is a very tiny sensor. In order to get decent photos (even by smartphone screen standards), you need to fuss a bit with it and that means missing the shot and mastering all of the modern controls. You need to frame the photo (sure) but then setting your style, depth, tone, what lens to use and if not in ideal lighting conditions, having some off-camera flash or using the built in flash or making everyone sit still for 1-3 seconds while a night image is captured. You could also just use ProRaw and do editing in Lightroom to “enhance” and denies then do some edits but you’re still fighting against the small sensor even with all of these things considered.
My iPhone point & shoots look like this:
I can take my time and make them look better but I shouldn’t have to especially when I’m wearing a camera that takes point and shoots like this (unedited and literally no staging or anything fancy just click that power button on and take a photo):
Adam stop…you’re comparing a $1750 smartphone (with tax) to a $5900 Leica Q2. Yeah, so? You guys keep saying how amazing the iPhone is at photos and in “auto” mode on both of these cameras, I’d pick the R5 or Leica any day and they’re always with me.
I’m getting off page a bit (sorry).
Instead of Apple making iPhone a better camera, they continue to push more and more complicated ways to take a photo and ask the user to figure out the details and it’s the user’s fault if skin tones are off or if there’s a lot of white noise and then just letting 3rd parties like Adobe fix the small sensor problems.
What I want from Apple is to be the best point & shoot camera in the world. Get everything perfect and don’t require me to mess around in editing to make a photo usable. I want to spend as little time as possible on my phone. I want to check an email, reply to a message and snap a photo and get back to life using my laptop and every improvement to photos on iPhone requires more time on iPhone to make the photos usable.
Let’s unpack that a bit more.
When Apple introduced slow-motion videos, I would shoot one of these, plug the iPhone into my Mac and import the video into Final Cut Pro and the video was no longer slow motion. If I export an image from iPhone and AirDrop or Image Capture it to my Mac, the photographic styles, the Live Photo, the hidden details and edits they’re all gone. I just get the original. What about the new post-shooting video modes where you can adjust the audio to be more studio quality? Same thing, it’s something you have to do on iPhone. You can’t export the video and adjust the audio with these same controls on the Mac or in Photos for Mac.
The amount of time I want to spend looking at and manipulating photos on a smartphone screen is 0 seconds. I can’t see the details well enough to know if the edit I’m doing is good or not. I want to see it on a larger screen and while some things like photographic styles have made their way to Photos for Mac in Sequoia, many features have not. So all of the extra features Apple has added to Camera + Photos on iPhone to try and give the user more control and fix the shortcomings of these tiny sensors has become limited to “edit and publish on your smartphone for other people to consume the content also on smartphones”
I think the whole industry has moved past anything larger than a 6 inch screen being used to view anything so if I want to master a video for viewing on a 65” 4K TV, I can do that but all of the new stuff iPhone can do to video it shoots is locked into the photos or camera app and 90% of people who look at my Flickr, Blog and YouTube are doing so on mobile phone screens.
So screw me for wanting good photos and videos simply because I like looking at photos and videos on a 32” 4K display or 65” Television?
But Adam, what if your’e just a bad photographer?
I never claimed to be a good photographer, that’s why I take photos with $6,000 cameras in Auto mode but what I want is to grab my camera, snap a photo, import it into Lightroom on my Mac, click “auto” adjustments on the edits screen and export to JPEG that’s my entire workflow.
Apple hasn’t done much in the physical sensor department to get close to the photographic capabilities of a full frame sensor with a nice long piece of glass attached and, in the computational photography space, they haven’t done much to make the iPhone so good that I can shoot it in auto mode and not feel like I have to pixel peep on a 6” screen to make edits so that I can upload photos to Flickr.
I find the entire iOS 18 + iPhone 16 Pro photography quality no better than any of the iPhones that came before it and the experience of shooting, previewing, editing and publishing photos is harder than ever.
Like, could I make this photo better? Sure but it is a good photo straight out of the iPhone? Not at all. It’s flat, lacks any depth, has pretty muted colors and very little detail unless you’re reading this on a phone.
I don’t have buyers’ remorse about the iPhone 16 or iOS 18. They’re great together and my email and messages load faster than ever. I am looking forward to diving deep on the video features when I can but every year I buy a new iPhone and every year I hope that photography finally got good enough to leave my Leica at home and I’m continually disappointed. I just want a pocket camera that takes the best photos ever without any fuss and Apple hasn’t cracked that yet. One day they will but it’s been 17 years. Maybe when I’m old?
What’s disappointing to me is that a billion people think iPhone photos are good. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
I hope iOS 19 creates a camera mode that is much simpler because the iOS 18 interface is way too hard to use for how little value it adds.
Here’s what Auto Mode on my Canon R5 can do:
..and here’s iPhone:
I’m so glad I didn’t spend hours walking to the Eiffel tower and had to deal with that as my photo but looking around, everyone else was taking photos on a phone so either I have exceptionally high standards for what a good photo is or everyone else is completely ignorant to what good photos look like.