iOS 27 Adds Customizable Camera Controls — Here’s How to Set Them Up
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As always, the weeks leading up to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were rife with rumors, speculation, and leaks on new features that would be arriving in iOS 27. While most of them were pretty accurate, there was one that didn’t materialize until this week’s iPhone event.
In May, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed the iOS 27 Camera app would be “fully customizable,” giving users much more control of what buttons they want to show up and where they want them to appear.
With the new approach, users will be able to choose which features appear in the Camera app — and where they’re placed. That includes controls for flash, exposure, the timer and resolution, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Mark Gurman
While there was no sign of this in the iOS 27 betas, Gurman said the feature was up and running on “the internal versions of Apple’s operating systems on employee devices.” Our hunch at the time was that Apple was simply delaying this until the fall. After all, it’s often waited to debut new Camera app features to match new camera hardware — and the variable aperture camera of the iPhone 18 Pro was perhaps the worst-kept secret of the new model.
In fact, the only real question about the new camera system leading up to this week’s event was whether it would be limited to iPhone 18 Pro Max or available on both models. Happily, the latter turned out to be true. The only differences between this year’s iPhone 18 Pro models are the obvious ones: the iPhone 18 Pro Max is bigger and therefore also has room for a larger battery that delivers longer run times.
However, the variable aperture came with a nice twist that explains why Apple likely chose to delay the iOS 27 Camera customizations. This year’s iPhone models will not only offer manual adjustment for the iris — four fixed settings of f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4.0 will be available — but also shutter speed and white balance. Plus, it’s even adding a histogram to help users more readily get the proper exposure levels, which can otherwise be challenging to gauge on an iPhone screen, especially in bright sunlight.
Those manual settings will be exclusive to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. However, all of the other Camera customizations are coming to older models, and they’re already live in the iOS 27 Release Candidate that showed up following Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” event on Wednesday.
How to Customize Your Camera in iOS 27
Once you’ve installed iOS 27 (which will be available to everyone on Monday), you can choose which buttons appear at the top of your Camera app interface simply by pressing and holding on the control row.
This will open up the full control palette — the same one that pops up when you tap on the selector at the bottom (e.g. “Photo” or “Video”). You can also access the customization screen by tapping the “Edit” button in the top-left corner when the controls are open.
The available controls will depend on your iPhone model, and a few can’t be permanently removed. For example, while you can add Night Mode to the controls so that it appears all the time, it will still pop up in low lighting conditions even if you haven’t explicitly added it.
Controls can be customized individually for separate modes, such as Photo, Video, Cinematic, and Portrait, although not all controls are available in all modes, of course. There are also a few that seem to persist, such as Action Mode and Dual Capture on newer iPhone Pro models, even if you’ve manually removed them. It’s unclear if that’s a bug, but it’s certainly a bit counterintuitive, as they’ll disappear when editing, but pop right back in as soon as you tap “Done.”
We expect this feature will work very similarly on the iPhone 18 Pro models, which will presumably simply add additional controls for the new manual adjustments, but we’ll have to wait until we get our hands on one to see how that works in practice. Pre-orders for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max open tomorrow, September 12, at 5:00 a.m. PT with the new models expected to arrive in stores — and eager customers’ hands — next Friday, September 18.
