Years of saving WhatsApp photos, screenshots and random downloads turn most people's camera roll into a mess. Apple is giving iPhone owners a quick way to cut through it.
IOS 27 adds a filter called Captured by Me to the Photos app, according to Macworld. It does exactly what the name suggests: switch it on and the library shows only the pictures you actually took with a camera, nothing forwarded, downloaded or screenshotted.
Getting to it takes a couple of taps. Open the Photos library and tap the icon with three horizontal lines in the top-left corner. Under the Collections section, there's now a Utilities group, and Captured by Me sits inside it alongside the other filtering tools Apple has built into Photos over the years.
One detail worth knowing: the filter isn't tied to a single phone. It pulls in photos shot on any iPhone that's ever been linked to the same Apple ID, so switching devices doesn't reset it or leave old photos behind. It also doesn't care which iPhone model took the shot, an iPhone 12 photo and one from an iPhone 17 Pro both count the same.
The feature sits next to another option that's existed in Photos for a while but is easy to miss. Inside that same three-line menu, under View Options, there's a toggle to hide screenshots from the main library entirely. Combine the two and the Photos app can, in theory, show nothing but the pictures and videos a person genuinely shot themselves, with screenshots and third-party saves filtered out of view without being deleted.
It's a small addition against the backdrop of everything else Apple has packed into iOS 27, but it addresses a real annoyance. Messaging apps like WhatsApp have long had settings that auto-save incoming media straight to the camera roll, and that habit compounds over years into libraries where real photos get buried under forwarded memes and duplicate screenshots. Apple's Search in Photos has gotten better at finding specific images even in a cluttered library, but a filter that removes the clutter at the source is a more direct fix for people who just want to scroll through their own memories.
Apple hasn't issued a separate announcement calling out Captured by Me as a headline iOS 27 feature. It appears to be one of the smaller interface changes bundled into the update, the kind that tends to surface through outlets poking around the Photos app's menus rather than through a keynote slide. For now, the filter is live for anyone running iOS 27, reachable through the same Collections and Utilities menu where Apple has quietly been adding sorting tools release after release.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
More from this desk →
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.