It’s basically impossible nowadays to tell if a photo was captured with a camera or generated with AI. But Apple might be making it a little easier to discern the truth — if you have an iPhone 18 Pro, that is.
Apple released three new phones at its September ‘Surprise and Shine’ event, including the first-ever folding iPhone, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. It also introduced a new kind of “digital negative” for your iPhone photos, called reference images. Reference mode can be used to verify the authenticity and provenance of your original photo — in other words, that it’s a real photo taken by you.
Apple’s new reference image technology starts the moment you capture a photo. Apple’s approach is different than other content provenance methods, including the widely adopted C2PA standard. Apple wrote in a technical paper that software-based methods for tracking changes are “vulnerable to compromise at any point in the editing chain, and a viewer has no way to detect such a failure.” So the company is betting on its own new hardware-integrated solution built directly into the photography process.
As for AI-generated media, Apple said it will support SynthID, a Google-led content authenticity initiative to embed invisible markers in AI content created with Apple’s Image Playground. Note: iPhone owners in the European Union and China will not have access to reference images at its launch.
How to use Apple reference images
Reference mode, which relies on a brand-new camera sensor found only in the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, is an optional feature that requires your iPhone to be running iOS 27. In your iPhone’s settings, go to Camera, and toggle on the Reference Image setting. Now, when you open your camera, you should have a new option called “reference,” just like you would choose between photo, video and other modes.
When shooting in that mode, the camera sensor is booted up and adds signature data to the raw data of your photo. This happens on a pixel level, the smallest unit of a photo that’s editable. Apple’s private cloud compute takes that signature and turns it into a reference image you can view in the Photos app, and you can use the feature when you’re offline.
While private cloud compute is also used to run Apple Intelligence, no generative AI is used to create your reference image. This is just Apple’s “cloud intelligence system” that can handle heavy-duty tasks off-device. Apple says the content of your images is not exposed to the company.
You can edit the photo captured in reference mode as usual, and use the widget at the top left to switch between the edited and original reference versions. Reference images are intentionally left with almost no processing, so while the lighting and color grading may look very different, they’re still proof of what objects, people and other elements were in your original shot.
Your reference images are linked with your photo, even after you edit them. They also include a secured timestamp, so you have another layer of proof of when the photo was originally taken.
In reference mode, you can capture photos in 12, 24 and 48 megapixels, which are rendered into JPEGs. Photos taken in reference mode will eat up more of your storage because they’re larger files, thanks to all the raw data captured in the process. Reference photos are about 8 to 10 MB each, which is about 3 MB larger than regular photos.
You may not always need a reference image for every photo you take. But for photojournalists, professional photographers and other creators, this new camera mode can help bring another layer of credibility to their work.
How to view reference images without an iPhone 18 Pro
Though not confirmed, it’s likely that Apple will add this sensor to future iPhones. With new devices getting increasingly expensive, however, we’re stretching out how long we keep our phones before we upgrade.
While you’ll need an iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max to capture photos with reference images, you don’t need one of these new phones to view reference images. All you need is a device that’s compatible with Apple’s newest software — iOS 27 on iPhones, iPadOS 27 for iPads or MacOS Golden Gate on MacBooks. That’s good news for iPhone owners, since iOS 27 is compatible with older phones as far back as the iPhone 11.
To view a reference image, open the file in the Photos app and check for that widget in the upper-left corner.
Right now, there’s no way for people on non-Apple devices — such as Android phones — or outside the Apple ecosystem to view reference images.
Apple is also adding its reference image logic to iOS 27’s API. This means that developers of third-party, non-Apple apps will be able to integrate the ability to view reference images into their services, if they choose to do so. This could potentially be good for photographers who use apps such as Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom and other services to edit their photos.
This isn’t a perfect, one-size-fits-all solution. Apple’s hardware solution is inherently limited to devices that are equipped with the necessary firepower to run it. But it’s another solution available to journalists, creators and anybody who cares about photo authenticity. And as our digital world is rapidly being devoured by generative AI, another layer of protection, even if it isn’t evenly spread, is ultimately a good thing.
