iOS 27 Brings Back the True 'Camera Roll'!
The new 'Captured by Me' collection finally separates your own photos from downloaded content, while advanced AI tools arrive with a strong focus on privacy.
The new 'Captured by Me' collection finally separates your own photos from downloaded content, while advanced AI tools arrive with a strong focus on privacy.
Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 27, delivers a long-awaited solution to one of the most irritating issues for iPhone users. It's a feature that finally separates the wheat from the chaff in your gallery-your own photos from all the other files that have piled up in the Photos app over the years.
The centerpiece is a collection called 'Captured by Me'. Its purpose is simple: to show only the photos and videos you've personally taken with your device's camera. In this section, you won't find screenshots, media downloaded from the internet, content shared by friends, or automatically generated memories. Beyond being a standalone collection, 'Captured by Me' also works as a filter you can activate on the main gallery to temporarily hide anything that isn't your own work.
With this move, Apple corrects a mistake made years ago when the popular 'Camera Roll' album was retired and replaced with 'Recents'. The latter lumped together absolutely all visual content on the phone, which frustrated many users and cluttered the view. The return of this logical function, based on reactions from beta testing, has been met with great approval, with some already comparing it to the standard camera view on Android devices.
The Photos app overhaul isn't the only news. A large part of the upgrades is powered by the 'Apple Intelligence' AI system, which puts tools previously reserved for specialized software at users' fingertips. The 'Clean Up' tool has been significantly improved, now removing unwanted objects or people from photos with much greater precision, even on complex backgrounds.
There are also two brand-new tools. The first, called 'Extend', allows you to intelligently expand the edges of a photo, with the AI generating the missing content on its own. The second, 'Reframe', is for adjusting the perspective of a shot after the fact. Alongside editing capabilities, organization has also been enhanced-you can now assign star ratings and keywords to photos and videos, making later searches much easier.
With these features, Apple directly challenges Google's solutions, like the Magic Eraser tool, but with a key difference. While competitors often rely on cloud computing for processing, Apple insists that most AI editing tasks are performed directly on the device. For more demanding tasks that require extra power, the 'Private Cloud Compute' system is used. It guarantees that data is encrypted and inaccessible even to Apple itself, aiming to preserve user privacy in an era when it's under increasing scrutiny.
While Apple grabs attention with software innovations, Google isn't resting. On its official Twitter profile, the company announced its new foldable phone on August 3, 2026. The post reads: "To change your phone, you have to be open to what's new. And to what unfolds. Google #Pixel11 Pro Fold. Expect more from your phone. August 12." The unveiling is scheduled for August 12, 2026, and the battle in mobile photography and AI is clearly heating up.
