Since I’ve recently complained a bit about Apple products, I thought I’d mention one of my favorite new features of its latest iOS and iPadOS systems, the ability to lift the subject of a photo. I’ve been finding it quite useful for creating photos for this fine blog.

All you have to do is find the photo in the Photos app in the iPhone or iPad (you need to be running version 16 of iOS or iPadOS, of course) and then press on the subject of that photo. You should see a white line running around the subject (sometimes you need to press a second time, and in some cases if the subject isn’t clearly defined it just won’t work, but that’s been very rare for me), and then the Copy, Share menu will appear.

Now you can Copy it to the clipboard where you can Paste it into another app, or you can Share it using Apple’s standard Sharing protocol (typical options are email, messages, Airdrop, Notes, etc.). 

What I’ve been doing is snapping the photo that I want, lifting the subject, sharing it onto my Mac via Airdrop, and then dropping it into my blog post. Works great.

At the top of this post is an original photo. Just below here is the photo after I’ve lifted the subject and the Copy, Share menu has appeared:

And Voila! The final photo:

I was initially a bit dismayed that it didn’t work directly on the Mac, but as I can Share the Subject to the Mac, that really hasn’t been a problem. Plus, because of Apple’s shared clipboard, I can even just Copy it to the clipboard on the iPhone and then Paste it into a graphics app on the Mac if I like.

I’ve had a Mac app for years that purported to do this, but it was difficult to use and I seldom got the results I wanted. This new Apple feature just works.