I keep spacing out because I’m out of my depth

Have you ever really looked at your Photos, man? There’s much depth there—just keep looking. I’m not stoned; I’m just thinking about Apple’s two ways of demonstrating depth in Photos to simulate adding a sense of layers or dimensionality to images you took with one or more cameras on your iPhone.

Starting way back in iOS 16, Apple started analyzing images for your Lock Screen to offer a cool in-front/behind split against the clock. In iOS 26, Apple went further, with Spatial Scene photos. I’ve heard from readers and seen online that both ways of spatializing photos leave people confused: Which photos does iOS choose? How does the analysis work? And, importantly for some, how do I disable these effects on a per-photo or overall basis?

Depth Effect

Starting way back in iOS 16 and available on an iPhone XR or XS or later, Depth Effect provides a sense of layering in a photo when used on your Lock Screen when you are pulling images from your Photos library. To access it:

Touch and hold your Lock Screen.

Tap Customize.

Tap the More … button.

If Depth Effect is not checked, select it; if it’s grayed out, see below. Your photos in the current display will be analyzed, which may take a moment; during that time, you will see a progress circle fill clockwise.

Tap Done.

Left: Use the More menu to enable Depth Effect. Right: You can see the hills rising in front of the clock display.

If you want to see how Depth Effect interacts with your images, a handy way is to choose On Tap from the More menu in step 3. When you tap, you can cycle through the current selection of images to see how they appear.

In doing so, you might notice that the Depth Effect doesn’t appear for every image. In fact, if you tap the more button and Depth Effect is grayed out, then the current image didn’t pass the depth analysis test.1 You can still enable the feature, but you have to tap to find another candidate—most qualify for depthifying!

The analysis in step 4 identifies objects and animals (including people) and makes educated silhouette guesses to separate foreground and background images. The clock element may resize to better display foreground elements. The foreground element may also be set to the background if it would obscure too much of the clock display.

Starting in iOS 26, you can adjust the clock’s depth by dragging it to make it taller on the screen. Depth Effect takes advantage of this by resizing the clock as needed.

In controlling Depth Effect, you might have noticed an oddball icon on your Lock Screen: a hexagon, with one tip at zero degrees, with a moon rising over some mountains. That is Spatial Scene, up next.

Spatial Scene

I have mixed feelings about Spatial Scene, new in iOS 26, because it partly invents reality and sometimes makes me a little queasy. Fortunately, I don’t have the motion sickness some iOS 7 users experienced with the long-ago introduction of parallax on wallpapers. But there’s another dale between the uncanny valley and the cliffs of heebie-jeebies that Spatial Scene fits into.

Spatial Scenes were designed for Apple’s Vision Pro, and the feature relies on machine learning to pick apart the depth in a 2D image. When you move your phone around, iOS creates a parallax effect that makes your brain think it’s looking into a 3D scene: the foreground elements remain steady, while background elements move. Spatializing doesn’t require photos captured with a newer camera, nor do you need Apple Intelligence. Any iPhone starting with the iPhone 12 series can generate them.2

Depth Effect shouldn’t make you hallucinate, but this red valerian appears normal at left, and a screen capture glitch may reveal some of the layers of depth that create the parallax effect.

You can also view images in the Photos app with the spatialization applied. Make sure Settings: Apps: Photos: Spatial Photos and Videos is enabled. This label is awfully confusing because the name of the iPhone feature is Spatial Scene, while the Vision Pro 3D feature is “spatial photo” as well as “spatial video,” both lowercase. Those kinds of media can only be viewed on a Vision Pro in 3D (they look 2D on an iPhone) and can be captured with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any model of iPhone 16 or iPhone 17, or Vision Pro.

Now, when you view a qualifying photo, a Spatial Scene hexagon button appears. Tap it, and you see a kind of scanner motion over the image as it’s analyzed. This resembles other scanning simulations in Photos, such as when it identifies plants, people, and buildings. A Spatial Scene version of the image appears, which you can view at simulated angles while moving your photo around. Tap the X to close the view. The analysis is not currently retained, so it’s regenerated each time you use the feature.

At left, this image of peonies is being scanned, with Photos using a wash of shimmering color passing over it to disguise that it’s engaged in a different operation behind the scenes. At right, the spatialized image is somewhat smaller to allow for movement in foreground and background, and has a X close button.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Apple poorly documents this feature, so I have read people complaining about this, but I can’t get it to turn gray on my iPhone. Apple used to explain why a photo might not support Depth Effect, but it removed that explanation from its documentation a few releases ago. ↩

The iPhone 11 and 2nd-generation iPhone SE can use iOS 26, but they can’t create Spatial Scenes. Apple didn’t say why. ↩