iOS 27 can show you only the photos you actually took

👋 HEY, IT'S RAJA

iOS 27 arrives today. So do iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, visionOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate. All free, and iOS 27 runs on the iPhone 11 and later, which is the same list as last year. Nobody is being cut off.

Apple never announces a release hour, but these updates usually land around 6pm in the UK, which is about 10:30pm here in India. So if you check Settings this morning and see nothing, that is normal. Come back tonight.

Everyone will be writing about Siri this week, and I will get to it on Wednesday. Today I want to show you something much smaller that I think you will use more often.

🔍 The find: Captured by Me

A view in Photos that shows only the images your own camera actually took.

The problem it solves

Open Photos and scroll. How much of what you see did you actually photograph?

For most people it is a minority. The rest is screenshots, receipts, QR codes, things saved from Safari, memes forwarded on WhatsApp, documents someone sent you, and every photo any group chat has ever decided you needed. Your camera roll stopped being a record of your life some years ago and became a dumping ground with your holidays buried somewhere inside it.

The usual advice is to spend a weekend deleting things. Nobody does this. iOS 27 takes a better approach and just filters the noise out.

How to find it

1. Open Photos.
2. Go to the Collections tab.
3. Tap Utilities.
4. Tap Captured by Me.

What you get is your library with everything you did not shoot stripped out. Scrolling back through a year suddenly works, because you are moving through a few hundred real photographs instead of several thousand screenshots.

What I use it for

Two things, mostly.

Finding an old photo, which used to mean scrubbing past months of screenshots to reach one afternoon. And deciding what to actually keep, because seeing your genuine photographs separated from the clutter makes it obvious how little of the clutter you want.

💡 Pro tip: while you are in Utilities, look at the other collections sitting next to it. Screenshots, Documents, and Receipts are gathered there too. If you have ever hunted for a receipt photo from four months ago, that is where it has been all along.

The catch

It is a view, not a reorganisation. Nothing is moved, nothing is deleted, and your main library is exactly as chaotic as it was this morning. Turning it off changes nothing back because nothing changed.

And it is buried four taps deep with a name you would never guess, which is the reason you are reading about it here rather than having found it yourself.

📱 Platform: iPhone, iPad

📍 Where: Photos → Collections → Utilities → Captured by Me

🧪 Requires: iOS 27, released today

💾 Changes nothing: it is a filter, not a move

One last thing before you update tonight: back up first, and if that iPhone is the one you work from, there is no prize for installing on day one. The first patch usually lands within a fortnight.

On Wednesday, Siri AI, and a straight answer on whether it is worth your attention.

Keep it useful,

Raja · The Useful Tech

P.S. Enjoyed this? Forward it to a friend who loves their Apple gear a little too much.