Apple's Image Playground can now make realistic AI photos in iOS 27

Apple's Image Playground app, which until now made only cartoon-style pictures, can create photorealistic images in iOS 27. Apple announced the change at its developer conference, WWDC. It is the first time Apple Intelligence, Apple's set of AI features, has produced images that look like real photos.

What changed

Image Playground launched in iOS 18.2 with a look similar to Pixar-style animation. Later updates added a Sketch style in iOS 18.4 and ChatGPT-powered styles in iOS 26. Leslie Ikemoto, Apple's Director of Input Experience, said the app was rebuilt from the ground up. It now uses stronger image models and can handle any style a user wants.

You can also start from your own photos and change them by typing or speaking a request in plain language.

Editing one spot at a time

The new editing tools may matter more than the realism. You tap to select one part of a picture, then change only that area. The rest of the image stays as it is.

• Add a new element to the selected spot.
• Change something that is already there.
• Remove it completely.
• Drag the corners of the selection box to resize it.

The app also has a pop-up menu for picking image size and aspect ratio, and it offers suggestions based on what you are working on. Developers can add the same image model to their own apps through the Image Playground API.

Privacy and the cloud

Apple is arriving later than Google and ChatGPT, which have offered realistic images for years. Its pitch is privacy. Realistic images are too heavy for a phone to make alone, so requests go to Apple's Private Cloud Compute, a system of Apple-run servers built to keep user data protected.

The report says Apple has adopted Nvidia's confidential computing platform to encrypt data at the hardware level. It also says Apple lets outside experts and independent reviewers inspect the system.

Spotting AI images

Realistic pictures make fakes easier to produce. To address that, Apple adds a hidden digital watermark using SynthID technology. The mark shows that an image was made with AI. The report does not say how people can check for the watermark.

What is not known yet

The material does not give a release date for iOS 27, a price, or which devices will get the new Image Playground. Those details are worth checking once Apple publishes them.