Apple is finally building the AI Photo editor that Google and Samsung have had for years

Google’s Photos app has been doing things that Apple’s Photos app couldn’t, for years, and the iPhone-maker has noticed. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, in his latest report, claims that iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 will come with a dedicated “Apple Intelligence Tools” section inside the Photos editing interface. 

The “Apple Intelligence Tools” section will include three new AI-powered photo-editing features: Extend, Enhance, and Reframe. Before we begin with what the features actually do, all of them will run entirely on-device, and, in a typical Apple fashion, complete their edits in seconds. 

What will the new Apple Intelligence photo editing tools do?

Extend, as the name suggests, extends a picture’s boundaries by generating new imagery and seamlessly stitching it to the existing one. You should be able to use the feature to add some surrounding to close-up shots or add some negative space to either side of the subject. 

Enhance, on the other hand, works as a one-tap enhancement button, which immediately adjusts the color, lighting, and the overall image quality, without going through different editing options and fiddling with various sliders. 

Reframe is designed primarily for spatial photos captured for the Vision Pro headset. It lets users shift the perspective of a 3D image after it’s already been taken, allowing you to move from a front-facing to a side-facing view. 

Is Apple actually ready to release all three features?

Not at the moment, no. Per Gurman, both the Extend and Reframe features are producing inconsistent results in the internal testing. If the underlying AI models don’t adapt or the results don’t improve significantly before the September launch event, Apple might delay them or scale back. 

While I’m a big fan of the Apple Photos app myself, it currently offers only one AI-based editing feature, Clean Up, and that doesn’t work as well as the feature does on other smartphones like the Galaxy S or the Pixel flagship series. 

I remember when Google released its Magic zeditor in 2023, and Samsung’s Galaxy AI followed quite aggressively in the coming years. In response, the best Apple could come up with was Clean Up. In my opinion, Apple genuinely needs the Extend, Enhance, and Reframe features to work, and work in time for a showcase at the WWDC 2026 and a public release in September.