Apple's iPhone update now marks AI-edited photos with a hidden label

Apple's iOS 27.2 update now adds a hidden mark to photos that were created or changed with AI tools in the Photos app. The mark is called SynthID. You will not see it, but a tool that checks for it can find it. The update arrived this week, about a month after the larger iOS 27 release.

What changed

SynthID is a watermarking standard developed by Google that works across platforms. Apple says iOS 27.2 supports it to help identify whether an image was generated or modified with generative tools in Photos and Image Playground.

That includes edits that can change key details in a picture. iOS 27 added tools such as Extend, Reframe and Clean Up in Photos. Apple is also tackling the problem of telling real images from AI ones with a Reference Image feature in iPhone 18 Pro.

Also in this update

iOS 27.2 brings four more improvements to Shared Albums, the private, social-media-style albums inside Photos. The source does not list them. To use them, your Shared Albums must be upgraded for iOS 27.

What is not known yet

• Which apps or sites can check for SynthID, and how an everyday user would do it
• Whether the mark survives screenshots or other edits
• Whether older AI-edited photos get the label