iPhone How-To - page 3

The new Apple Passwords app makes it easier than ever to save login details for your apps, start using passkeys and create shared groups.

iCloud Keychain has been around for years, saving your passwords for you. But if you’ve ever had to copy a password out of the system to enter on a different computer, you had to dig through Settings — if you could even figure out how. The functionality discouraged a lot of people from using Apple’s password manager. It’s easy to find in iOS 18, thanks to a dedicated Passwords app you can put on your Home Screen.

The time of using the same password on all your internet accounts is over. Apple’s password manager is free, syncs everywhere (even with Windows PCs) and is incredibly easy to use. It creates strong passwords and automatically fills them in so you never need to.

Here’s how it works.

Apple’s new Visual Intelligence feature provides a quick way to find information just by pointing an iPhone 16’s camera at an object in the real world. Then you can ask ChatGPT to explain what you’re looking at, do a reverse image search to find products and look things up visually, get information on a business as you walk down the street, quickly add events to your calendar and identify plants and animals.

With the release of iOS 18.4, Apple added the capability to use Visual Intelligence on iPhone 15 Pro models. Here’s how it works.

The new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 lineup opens the Camera app, takes pictures and adjusts camera settings on the fly. It offers a quick shortcut to using one of the most popular and important iPhone features.

Apple baked a lot of controls and interactivity into this innovative button. But while Cupertino’s designers are usually restrained, some people find this new user interface a little fiddly. The physically clicking button also accepts touch input when you swipe your finger along it. And it utilizes pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback as you maneuver through the iPhone’s camera settings.

Learn how to master the iPhone 16’s new Camera Control button in our guide below.

Apple’s redesigned Photos app in iOS 18 brings the biggest changes ever to how you browse your pictures, videos and memories on your iPhone. Gone are the separate tabs across the bottom. Now the Photos app delivers a single, scrollable view. Scroll up to see your library; scroll down to sort through albums, people and memories.

It takes some getting used to — and the big changes are driving some people absolutely insane. To get a grip on all the changes, you need to learn where to find your recently saved images, deleted photos and your album of hidden photos.

Here’s how it works.

You can manually add a workout to Apple Fitness+ if you need to log some exercise while you weren’t wearing your Apple Watch. Maybe your watch ran out of battery at the start of your run, or maybe you simply forgot to turn it on. By adding a missing workout, you can give yourself credit for the exercise you did.

This power could be used for evil as well as good. You could, hypothetically, say you ran a three-hour marathon every day last week. But you would only be fooling yourself.

To find out how to add a workout to Apple Fitness+, watch our short video or keep reading below.

iPhones are, by definition, wireless devices, but a connection via Ethernet adapter brings speed, security and reliability. Fortunately, adding a wired internet connection to your iPhone is very easy.

Here’s how.

Image Wand is a new feature in Apple Notes that turns rough sketches into full images — and creates images from scratch based on text prompts. Granted, it’s powered by Image Playground, so the imagery it creates isn’t exactly state of the art. Apple’s image-making tools still lag other AI systems. But if you’re a struggling artist, it may improve your squiggles.

Image Wand is part of Apple Intelligence, the growing set of AI features that work on the latest iPhones, Macs and iPads. It runs entirely on-device, so you don’t have to worry about usage limits, tokens or setting up accounts.

Check out how Image Wand works in the article below, or watch our quick video.

The best way to send someone a great article you just read online is to share a link with highlighted text. It will quote whatever you found interesting in the post and encourage them to click the link.

While you could copy the quote and paste it in alongside the link, there’s a hidden way to do it in Safari. It’ll properly format the rich link with the quoted text highlighted above.

If you want to quote a specific line from an article or a how-to (like this one), sending it with a pull quote is easier and looks nicer than copying the text you want and putting it in quotation marks as a separate text.

And it takes just a second! Here’s how to share a link with highlighted text.

If you find yourself in a situation where a police officer or federal agent — like a TSA person at the airport — requests or demands your iPhone, should you hand it over? Many folks say no, never. But if you do, at least know how to hard-lock it in a hurry before it leaves your hand. That will help protect your data on the device.

You can now set DeepL Translate as the default translation application on iPhones and iPads, replacing Apple’s own app. Powered by artificial neural networks, the machine-translation service supports a wider range of languages than Apple’s Translate app. And in our testing, it delivered slightly better translation as well.

DeepL Translate is the first third-party app that can serve as the iPhone’s default translation app … it beat Google Translate to the punch. The option works for iPhone users in the United States and the European Union.

Here’s how to set DeepL as the default on your iPhone or iPad.

If you ever lose access to your Apple Account or iPhone, you’ll be happy you set up a recovery contact in advance. Once you do, a trusted person can remotely unlock your iPhone for you if you can’t recall your password.

It only takes a few moments to set up — and could be a huge weight off your shoulders if you’re desperate, frustrated and just want to unlock your Apple account. Once you designate a recovery contact (and they accept), you can easily ask them for help.

Here’s how it works.

Apple News+ Food is a great way to find recipes on your iPhone. It gives you personal recommendations and offers dozens of filters to find all kinds of recipes, from easy slow-cooker fare to gluten-free concoctions. Plus, all the recipes are nicely formatted, with easy-to-read instructions. And you can save recipes you like for later to build up a personal catalog of go-to dishes.

It’s a very well-thought-out addition to an Apple News+ subscription, a tasty complement to the service’s news stories, magazine features and daily puzzles. Apple is slowly but surely replicating all the great features of traditional newspapers.

Here’s how to get cooking with Apple News+ Food. Keep reading or watch our hands-on video.

You could have dozens of copies of the same images in your Photos library, taking up space on your phone and in your iCloud account. Luckily, Apple offers an easy-to-use little tool that lets you find duplicate photos and delete the copies, all right from the Photos app.

These types of duplicate images can accumulate more quickly than you might expect. They arise if you make a copy of a photo to edit, if you screenshot a photo to bump it to the top of your Camera Roll, or if you and your partner both upload the same picture to your Shared iCloud Photo Library. In fact, I found hundreds of duplicates in my own carefully curated library.

It’s a surprisingly sophisticated feature that took Apple engineers a fair amount of smarts to cook up (more on that later). Here’s how to use Apple’s duplicate image remover and get rid of all those unnecessary files. Keep reading or watch our video instructions.

Believe it or not, there are actually quite a few helpful tricks Siri can do — besides setting timers and sending texts. Granted, there’s a lot of things Siri can’t do, especially with the recent news that the smarter, more capable Siri promised with Apple Intelligence and the total LLM-powered overhaul are both significantly delayed.

Nonetheless, after many hours of research, I have come across six neat things you can ask Siri you might find surprising or handy. Keep reading our list or watch our video.

You can easily change the default browser on your iPhone if you prefer to use Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge or any other alternative. Maybe you use a PC at home and want your bookmarks, history and passwords to sync to your iPhone. Or maybe you simply prefer something other than Apple’s Safari browser.

Whichever browser you set as your iPhone’s default will open when you tap on a link from Messages or Mail, get AirDropped a URL, scan a QR code, search the web with Siri and perform other tasks. This doesn’t mean Safari will be deleted, however. Apple’s stock app will remain installed on your iPhone if case you decide to switch back (which is super-easy).

Here’s how to change the default browser on your iPhone — and transfer your bookmarks and data, too. Keep reading or watch our quick video.

It’s World Backup Day, a good opportunity to learn how to clear iCloud storage of old backup files made by iPhone and iPad. Are you running out of iCloud storage space? Worried about privacy? You might want to delete some old backups from the cloud.

The good news is erasing these files is easy if you know the steps to follow. Here’s how.

Vocal Shortcuts let you control your phone by speaking a command out loud. Think “Hey Siri,” but for running your own custom actions from Apple’s Shortcuts app. (Here’s a quick rundown on Shortcuts, if you’re not familiar with this powerful tool.)

Using Vocal Shortcuts is a versatile way to automate tasks on your iPhone with the power of your voice alone. You don’t need to make space on your Home Screen for a Shortcuts widget, type anything into Spotlight or, god forbid, open the Shortcuts app.

You can create a Vocal Shortcut that opens an app you use often, like the Apple TV remote, for instant access with your voice.

You can even use this feature as a roundabout way to use “OK Google” — or whatever your favorite alternative voice assistant may be — instead of Siri.

Watch our quick video or keep reading.

The Photographic Styles feature built into your iPhone’s camera can give your pictures a radically different aesthetic. And once you nail down your personal photo style or styles, you can make sure all your pictures use these specific filters. And on a newer iPhone, you can edit them after the fact.

Photographic Styles can save you the time you’d waste editing your pictures in Instagram or VSCO. Since they live in the iPhone’s camera and in Apple’s Photos app, you can see them while you’re shooting your pictures, too. Read on to see how to edit your photos in these different styles or watch our video below.

You should get comfortable with the world’s handiest camera so you can capture memories that will last a lifetime. After all, more and more people are leaving behind family point-and-shoot cameras for the smartphones in their pockets. With our iPhone photography tips, you won’t need the latest and greatest in your pocket.

If you know the ins and outs of photography, you can make the most out of a years-old camera. In fact, the winner of the 2020 iPhone Photography Awards took the prize-winning picture on an iPhone 4!

No matter what phone you have, check out these pointers for the casual and curious. And watch our video to see them in action.

Apple Music Classical is a new app for iPhone specifically designed as a great experience for browsing and listening to instrumental music. Its catalog of 5 million tracks has been carefully curated and tagged by composer, work, movement, instrument, orchestra, artist and more.

Why does there need to be a separate app for classical music? Apple says it succinctly on its support page: classical music “has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces.” This app “is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.”

This is how to discover, find, add and listen to music in Apple Music Classical.

You can use the Apple logo as an emoji … if you know how. Expressing your love for all things Apple looks a lot better if know how to type the .

It’s easy to do on a Mac, and I can show you how to add  to texts on iPhone and iPad, too.

How can you report a spam text you get on your iPhone, and what happens when you report it? Where does the report go? Does anyone look at these things?

Apple has useful tools like Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple for managing email spam, but text spam can be far more annoying. You don’t have a spam filter for your texts, and texts can be easier to fake.

If you’re getting spam texts, there are a few different steps you can take to can it, and I’ll walk you through all of them.

You can visit the App Store to download Apple apps like Music, Podcasts, Weather, Maps and Find My missing from your iPhone or iPad. If you can’t find them. It’s possible you uninstalled them and your device needs to download them again. Or they might have simply disappeared from your Home Screen, and are now hiding in the App Library.

There are also a few iPhone apps that Apple hasn’t made available on iPad. This was the case with Calculator until very recently, so you may need to install an update to get it.

I’ll walk you through all the possibilities, showing you how to get Apple’s stock apps back on your iPhone or iPad.

If you want to keep your iCloud data completely private and secure, but you live in the United Kingdom — where Apple is rolling back Advanced Data Protection to comply with government demands — you’ll need an alternative to iCloud sync and backup features.

That’s because the only option is to not use iCloud. There’s no getting around it: without Advanced Data Protection, your iCloud backups can potentially be snooped on.

Turning off iCloud will have many negative ramifications. iCloud manages syncing services across all your devices. If you own an iPhone, Mac and/or iPad, iCloud makes sure all your messages, photos, app data, notes, passwords, bookmarks, etc., appear everywhere.

Without Advanced Data Protection, there are still a few of these backup services that are end-to-end encrypted. But a few critical services, like device backups, are not — and if you don’t disable them, you’ll have a big hole in your data security. Keep reading or watch our video.

The new Music Haptics accessibility feature in iOS 18 adds another dimension to audio: vibration. Taking advantage of the incredible precision of the iPhone’s Taptic Engine, the feature brings to life a specially recorded track of rhythmic vibrations and buzzing patterns timed to certain Apple Music songs.

Switch it on, and you can hold your iPhone in your hands and feel your music in a whole new way. Keep reading to see how the feature works (or watch our video that explains it all).