Apple’s latest iOS beta brings a generative fill tool to the Photos app — but is it any good?
When Apple announced the iOS 27 Extend feature at WWDC, I was skeptical. Generative image expansion has been available on Google Pixel phones and through third-party apps for a while, but Apple tends to wait until it can polish a feature before shipping it. After spending several days with the developer beta on an iPhone 17, I can say the tool is genuinely useful — even if it sometimes produces results that look like they wandered out of a dream sequence.
The Photos app overhaul includes three marquee additions: an improved Clean Up tool, Spatial Reframing for spatial video, and the Extend feature. Extend is the headliner — it lets you expand any photo beyond its original boundaries, with Apple Intelligence filling in the missing pixels. I threw everything I could at it: selfies, food shots, portraits taken with a Nikon mirrorless, and casual indoor snaps. Here’s what I learned.
How the Extend tool actually works
Using the feature is straightforward. Open a photo in the Photos app, tap the hamburger menu at the bottom, select Tools, then choose Extend. You can pinch to zoom out, reposition the frame, and drag the edges to any aspect ratio you want. The tool takes about 10 to 15 seconds to generate the expanded image — fast enough that you won’t get impatient.
One smart design choice: Apple baked Extend directly into the Crop tool. If you’re already cropping a photo, just pinch outward beyond the original frame, and the Extend option appears at the bottom of the screen. It feels natural, like the feature was always meant to be there.
Where the AI stumbles — and stumbles hard
Not every result is a winner. In fact, some are downright weird.
I tested Extend on a photo of a mango pastry on a café table. The original frame showed just the pastry and a plastic spoon. After expansion, the AI added a second pastry that never existed, a blurry person in the background, and an extra plate edge on the left. The spoon extension looked convincing; everything else screamed “AI hallucination.”
Another test: I shrank a café interior shot to the center of the frame and let Extend fill all four sides. The tables and chairs at the top turned soft and dreamlike. Gray and black bags lost their definition. Plates on the left shifted in color. It’s the kind of result that looks fine at a glance but falls apart under scrutiny.
I sent one particularly goofy expanded photo — a flower shot extended in all directions — to four friends. Only one thought it was real. The other three spotted the AI artifacts immediately: weird shrubs, a floating flower, leaves that seemed to grow from nowhere.
Some expansion directions are blocked
Extend occasionally refuses to expand in certain directions. I couldn’t figure out a consistent pattern. In some cases, a human subject sat near the edge where I wanted to expand, so that might be a deliberate safety restriction. But other denials had no obvious explanation. The feature also requires an active internet connection — it won’t work offline or over a slow Wi-Fi network, which limits its usefulness on a plane or in a remote area.
But when it works, it’s surprisingly good
For all its quirks, the iOS 27 Extend feature delivers genuinely impressive results often enough to make it worth using.
I tested it on a portrait of a friend taken with a Nikon mirrorless camera at a birthday party in May. The original composition was tight; I expanded the frame to give her more breathing room. The AI filled in shrubs and grass at the bottom left — the texture isn’t perfect, but she couldn’t tell the difference. The tree silhouette and foreground plants came out clean. Only the leaves at the top gave away the trick.
Another strong result: a photo taken at a café with a blurred stranger in the background and reflections in a mirror. Extend preserved the shallow depth of field perfectly, keeping the background person appropriately soft while maintaining the mirror reflections. It’s the kind of subtle edit that would take minutes in Photoshop.
My favorite Extend edit so far
The best result came from a landscape shot of a water bed with mountains in the distance. Extend filled in the water texture to the left, added a canopy stand on the right, and extended the mountain range convincingly. It did add a car that wasn’t there and made my arm look slightly odd, but for a social media post, it’s more than good enough.
An indoor birthday shot also turned out well. The AI added a gift box at the bottom, a lamp on the left, a door on the right, and a partially visible chair behind me — none of which existed in the original. It even bent the ceiling slightly to mimic a wide-angle lens effect, which was either a happy accident or a surprisingly sophisticated touch.
Is the Extend feature worth using?
After a week of testing, I’d say the iOS 27 Extend feature is a solid addition to Apple’s AI toolkit. It’s not flawless — you’ll still get artifacts, especially with complex textures or multiple subjects. But the best results are good enough that you’d need to pixel-hunt to spot the fakery.
Apple marks edited photos with a tag in the metadata (swipe up in the Photos app to see it), which is a nice transparency touch. The feature is best for casual edits: adding a bit of breathing room to a tight portrait, turning a vertical shot into a horizontal one for Instagram, or simulating an ultrawide perspective when you didn’t have the right lens.
Would I trust it for professional work? Not yet. But for everyday use, it’s already more useful than I expected. And for a first-gen beta feature, that’s saying something.
