Your Photo Memories Can Now Be Scored by Maroon 5 — Here’s How to Set It Up

Apple has probably shown more love to the Photos app on the iPhone and iPad over the past few iOS releases than any other single app, which makes sense considering how prominent of a feature the camera is on Apple’s latest iPhones, not to mention the human emotional connection that comes from exploring photos.

Although the latest iOS 13 release has added more AI curation features to help surface your best photos, Apple actually started this trend back in 2016, when iOS 10 debuted a new Memories feature that would automatically pick out and group photos and videos from significant moments in your past — such as vacations, birthdays, holidays, or even just an “On this day” compilation — and organize them into a video slideshow.

From the day the feature was introduced, Apple has provided a fairly wide array of music to use as the soundtrack for these memory movies, and it will even automatically try and pick one to match the theme, although of course you can edit the video and choose a different song from the list to match the mood, or even choose any track that you actually own from your personal Music library.

‘Memories’

Most of the music that Apple provides is pretty good, but it’s from smaller and relatively unknown artists. Now, however, with the release of iOS 13, Apple has teamed up with the pop rock band Maroon 5 to help promote the Memories feature in the new Photos app.

According to Billboard, the band partnered with Apple for the release of its latest single, Memories, as it seemed like a good fit for the long-standing iOS feature that bears the same name. As a result, iPhone and iPad users will be able to select the app-suggested Maroon 5 track to use as the soundtrack for their own Memories movies.

No matter what happens in the world around you, think about those people you love and share some good memories. We wrote this song to bring people together. It’s an important message for right now, and we love that we can still surprise ourselves and our fans after all these years.

Adam Levine, Maroon 5

The move is of course a promotion for the band’s new song as well, which is making the most of it by creating its own “Made with Memories” video that’s exclusively available on Apple Music (naturally) — a short preview clip that reveals the band’s own memories, from birthdays to garage practices and early recording sessions — and all of Adam Levine’s hairstyles too.

How to Set It Up

If you haven’t really explored Apple’s Memories feature before, you may not even realize that you can change up the music, but it’s actually pretty easy to do:

1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad
2. Tap the For You tab. This will show you a list of memories that iOS has already created for you.
3. Tap one of the memories. The memory will open into a view with a video at the top followed by a series of photos.
4. Tap the movie at the very top to begin playing it. It may take a moment to download all of the pieces from iCloud, after which it will begin playing with the default music that iOS has already chosen
5. Tap the screen to bring up the controls
6. Tap the Edit button in the top right corner
7. Tap Music
8. Tap Edit Music
9. Tap Soundtracks
10. Choose Pop from the list of genres
11. Scroll down to find “Memories” by Maroon 5
    

Of course, you can also select other music tracks from here, and you can preview any track by tapping the play button that appears at the right hand side of each. Alternatively, you can select music from your own personal library in by choosing My Music in step 9, but keep in mind that these have to be tracks you’ve either purchased or loaded up from other sources — Apple Music tracks can’t be used here. In addition to changing up the music, you can also create your own custom titles, choose which photos and videos to include, and adjust the length of the movie.