Photos Memory Mixes

With iOS 15, Apple is also making the biggest enhancement to its Photo Memories feature since it first introduced it five years ago.

Chelsea Burnette, Apple’s Senior Manager or Photos Engineering took the stage to demonstrate how the entire Memories experience has been rethought and redesigned, providing a more immersive full-screen layout with larger cards and much more intuitive and simple editing features to let you create the perfect theme around your memory movies.

Dubbed “Memory Mixes,” iOS 15 will now let you choose predefined looks and music with pacing and filters to match. These aren’t generic filters either, but rather, as Burnette explains, iOS 15 will actually analyze each photo in the memory to apply consistent colouring and contrast.

The old list of boilerplate music has also been replaced with suggested tracks from Apple Music, including personalized recommendations. You’ll be able to search for specific songs or pull up songs from your listening history.

When viewing a memory, you’ll also now be able to pause on an individual video or image to take a longer look, or swipe back to one that just passed, and the music will remain in sync.

Basically, it looks like iOS 15 will move away from generating an actual video file into a more dynamic real-time presentation of images and videos in a memory, although presumably there will still be a way to export it to a traditional video once you’re done with it. It’s unclear in this case how Apple Music will fit into the picture, however, since you likely won’t be able to share these tracks.