Apple Reference Photo Lets iPhone Photographers Prove What’s Real

Skip to content Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. The iPhone 18 Pro lets you snap unalterable reference photos to prove what you captured is real. Apple Apple spent much of its “Surprise and shine” fall event breathlessly detailing the new AI capabilities of Apple Intelligence and the new Photographic Styles with the iPhone 18 Pro. The new features offer greater AI-assisted abilities to change the look of a photo. In the midst of all this, the company also introduced a defense against AI-generated and -altered images. The iPhone 18 Pro adds a new Reference camera mode, which digitally authenticates that an image you took with the phone hasn’t been altered with AI. It creates an unalterable reference photo captured by the phone’s sensor. The phone sends sensor signatures and other identifiers to Private Cloud Compute to authenticate the reference photo. Reference photos are saved in the Photos app next to the main image that can be edited so you can see the original and edited versions next to one another to compare the two. Apple also announced support for Google’s SynthID standard for authenticating images. Together, these tools give photographers and journalists ways to verify their work. And fishermen now have verifiable evidence that the fish they caught really was that big.