This is The Digital Story Podcast #951, June 11, 2024. Today's theme is "Apple Intelligence - Nonthreatening to Photographers, for Now." I'm Derrick Story.

Opening Monologue


Unlike our friends at Adobe, Apple isn't targeting the photo shoot with their AI integration into the upcoming versions of its OS and photo apps. There are lots of new goodies in the toy box, and many of them will be useful for photo enthusiasts. In today's show, I'll provide an overview from a photographer's perspective and also discuss Adobe's latest controversy. I hope you enjoy the show.




Digital Photography Podcast 951






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Apple Intelligence - Nonthreatening to Photographers, for Now






Apple Intelligence is Apple's branding of Artificial intelligence into its operating system and apps. They are aiming to apply this technology in ways that make your life easier and more creative while at the same time keeping your privacy intact. They're calling it AI for the rest of us.



To some degree, based on the keynote presentation at WWDC, I think the marketing is lining up with real-world application. Apple Intelligence powers new writing tools to put your written communications in the best light, you can create new Pixar-like images with Genmoji, you can generate illustrations from scratch with Image Playground, and you can create professional-looking movies easily that are based on the pictures you have captured and stored in your Photos library.



Most of the generated images in the keynote were illustrative rather than photographic. I didn't see anything that resembled the output from my digital camera. But, according to the documentation, Image Playground does have the ability to transform sketches into polished photographs. And I can't see this happening on-device, so the user would have to venture out into the Cloud for this capability.



But generally speaking, if you want to create a custom emoji for a text message or an illustration for a school paper, Apple Intelligence will do a nice job.



When applied to the Photos app, this technology will further improve search capabilities, provide better organizing options, and even give us a nifty Clean Up tool for removing unwanted items from a composition.



To tap this tech you will need an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, a Mac with Apple Silicon, or a M-powered iPad. The hardware requirements are steep because Apple's approach is to do as much AI processing on the device as possible, with options for venturing out into the Cloud as needed. Users will have control over where the processing occurs, which is a good option for most of us.



The unknown is, however, what will developers want to do with this technology, and what will Apple allow them to put on its platform? Apple is providing an SDK with App Intents, APIs, and frameworks to make it easy for developers to integrate system-level features like Writing Tools and Image Playground into their apps.



Of particular interest to our community is the SDK for Image Playground. Here's what Apple is saying to developers:


"Image Playground delivers an easy-to-use experience to create fun, playful images in apps like Messages, Notes, Keynote, Pages and more. Using the Image Playground API, you can add the same experience to your app and enable your users to quickly create delightful images using context from within your app. And because images are created entirely on device, you don't have to develop or host your own models for your users to enjoy creating new images in your app."

Again, sounds fun and lighthearted. And it very well may stay that way. And it's going to be very interesting to see what savvy software companies like Pixelmator do with all of this new capability.


macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 will be released this Fall. Betas will be available to the general Mac community soon. I'm really looking f