Photos App Gets Video Export Feature iOS 27 Finally Offers
What You Need to Know
- Apple Photos adds slideshow builder with customizable duration, transitions, and music export as video.
- Shared Albums now offer full-resolution photo and video access instead of compressed versions.
- Photos app introduces Identity Documents folder to automatically organize passports, licenses, and similar cards.
- Users can save individual video frames as still photos directly within the Photos app.
The real story in Apple’s Photos update isn’t the slideshow tool itself, it’s that exporting a slideshow as a video is something third-party apps like Google Photos have offered for years, and iPhone users have been routing around this gap the whole time.
Apple is adding a slideshow builder to Photos in iOS 27 that lets users set slide duration, transition style, and background music, then save the result directly as a video file to their library. On paper that sounds minor. In practice, it closes one of the more embarrassing gaps between Photos and competing gallery apps that have offered this without ceremony since the early 2010s.
The update also includes a few features that will matter more to everyday users than the slideshow headline:
- Save individual video frames as still photos directly in the app
- Full-resolution photo and video access in Shared Albums (previously limited to compressed versions)
- Emoji reactions and a recent activity view in Shared Albums
The Shared Albums resolution change is the quieter but more consequential fix. Anyone who has used Shared Albums to distribute family photos knows the compressed output made them nearly useless for printing or editing. Apple is not advertising this loudly, but it addresses a complaint that has circulated in Apple support forums for over a decade.
New Collections and Search
Apple is also introducing curated collections inside Photos, including one called “Captured by Me” and a dedicated Identity Documents folder that automatically surfaces passports, licenses, and similar cards. The Identity Documents collection in particular reflects how people already use their camera roll as a document scanner, and formalizing that behavior reduces the need for third-party scanning apps.
Improved search for people and pets rounds out the update, building on the machine learning identification tools Apple has been refining since Photos launched in 2015. The gap between what the app can recognize and what it could usefully surface in search has always been wider than it should be.
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