5 iPhone Camera Settings You May Not Know You Can Change

The iPhone camera has come a long, long way since its humble 2 MP origins. Now many people consistently rank it as the best smartphone camera option, period, though that is of course always up for debate. Beyond image fidelity, what arguably appeals most about the iPhone camera is how easy and straightforward it is to use. It is point-and-shoot in the truest sense. Most casual photographers never need to open the settings because the defaults will take beautiful pictures for them at any time of day, in any situation. However, a handful of settings changes can eke just a bit more out of the iPhone camera.

To change camera settings on the iPhone, simply open the Settings app and scroll down to Camera. All of the settings we will look at today can be found there — we won’t be looking at any in-app settings or third-party camera apps. We’ve chosen some tweaks that will make your photos look better, make them easier to shoot, and round off some of the rough edges of the iPhone camera app.

Whenever you use the iPhone camera, most changes you make to the in-app settings generally reset by the time you open the app again. If, say, your camera was in portrait mode when you last used it, it will open again in the default photo mode. This can get really annoying. 

Perhaps you never, ever use Live Photos, either because you have no use for them or they take up too much space. Even if you turn it off, you’ll find your iPhone keeps taking them and occasionally ruining what should be normal, static shots. Luckily, the “Preserve Settings” feature means that the next time you snap a shot, your iPhone will remember the previous camera selection for a specific setting — Live Photos will be off until you reenable it, per our example.

Scroll down a bit to the Preserve Settings section. You’ll find it just below the settings for video resolution. Now, feast your eyes. Almost every major camera setting has its own toggle. If you take a lot of video, for example, you can make sure the camera reopens in video mode rather than photo mode; if you prefer night photography with the flash setting on, you can preserve that instead of the iPhone defaulting back to auto; you can make sure that Action Mode (the super-stable camera mode for shots with lots of movement) remains on. You get the idea.

Tell me if this has happened to you before: you take a picture of a gorgeous landscape, only to find later that your camera was askew by a couple of degrees. Fixing this is easy. Using the crop tool, you can straighten the photo, but that will trim a bit off the photo’s edges, potentially putting a damper on an otherwise majestic, sweeping shot. The easiest way to prevent tilted photos forever — in both portrait and landscape orientation — is with the iPhone’s built-in Level. Similar to the Measure app’s level that can turn your iPhone into a bubble level, the camera level encourages straightened shots before you take them.

Scroll down to the Composition section below where you previously found “Preserve Settings.” Here you’ll find a number of settings helpful for perfecting social media shots, like an overlay grid. Just below it is “Level.” Toggle this on, and now anytime you use the camera app and you’re taking a slightly off-kilter shot, a guide will pop up. It gently indicates you to turn your phone until you have one unbroken, yellow line, signifying that the camera is level. It only turns on if your camera is pointed straight forward, and positioned straight up and down; it won’t appear in other shooting situations where it could be annoying. Without this thing, I probably would have a ton of landscape pictures annoyingly tilted like a pinball machine.

Back in school, there used to be this prank where you’d open someone’s iPhone camera (the only thing you could usually access when locked) and then take dozens and dozens of selfies as quickly as possible so the next time they opened their camera roll, they’d have to delete perhaps hundreds of silly pictures. One reason you could do that is probably iPhone’s Prioritize Faster Shooting setting. 

Apple says this setting is “intelligently adapt[ing] image quality when rapidly pressing the shutter.” In layman’s terms, your iPhone is processing photos less (making them look worse) to avoid interrupting a fast sequence of shots. Great if you take a fair amount of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it type shots; a model sashaying down the runway, for example. Not so great if you tend toward more static imagery and want every shot to bring the full weight of the iPhone’s image processing to bear.

Scroll down past the photo capture section to find a lone Prioritize Faster Shooting toggle. For a lot of people, it’s probably the best if you just turn this one off. Anecdotally speaking, the delay when disabled is very, very minimal. But if it ever does get in your way, it will take you all of three seconds to turn it on for the situations where you need the camera to churn out pictures as fast as it can. Here are some more iPhone camera settings you can change for better photos.

There are a lot of ways to open the iPhone’s camera from the lock screen. You can press and hold the camera icon, press the Action button (iPhone 15 Pro and above), press the Camera Control button (iPhone 16 and above), or swipe left on the lock screen. One to three options too many, depending on whom you ask. Luckily, any iPhone updated to iOS 26 can disable the latter. Some people found it to be incredibly annoying; you might accidentally open the camera instead of, say, clearing away a notification. Whatever the reason, if you don’t use it you might as well turn it off and prevent accidental misfires.

Scroll all the way to the bottom and the second to last toggle will say “Lock Screen Swipe to Open Camera.” Make sure it’s set to off unless you need it. Since there are so, so many ways to open the camera on the iPhone — especially if you have a newer model with the Action button and or Camera Control button — you very likely won’t miss it.

The new Camera Control feature introduced in the iPhone 16 lineup was meant to bring your smartphone one step closer to a DSLR — an all-in-one shutter controlling zoom, exposure, depth, tone, and more. However, users are mixed on the feature, with many — myself included — only using it to open the camera and nothing else. Anyone who’s used it knows it’s quite finicky and not at all intuitive. Often, just using the options already available to you right there on the screen do a much better job. If that describes how you feel about Camera Control, you’ll be happy to know you can change or completely disable the button.

Camera Control has a separate section within camera settings, with a surprising amount of customization. Options to change how many clicks it takes to open the camera, to enable Visual Intelligence with a press and hold, and customization options when swiping back and forth; the latter is great because you can un-check the many settings tied to camera control and focus on just one, like zoom.

Even better, you can have the Camera Control button open a different app entirely. It can be set to use a third-party camera, social media camera, the Magnifier, the Code Scanner, or nothing at all. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow you to use the Camera Control button as a second “Action button” for changing focus modes or running shortcuts. But if you find you never really use the Camera Control, you might as well put it to some use or just shut it off to avoid accidental presses.