The Apple Watch gets a new photo interface in watchOS 11, and we’re happy to report that it’s a big improvement over the last one.
The new interface replaces the old Photos interface, which did the job in a very basic way, allowing you to select photos with time and some sophisticated features.
I tested the new app on an Apple Watch Series 9 with the watchOS 11 developer beta installed, and it’s almost its own standalone app for the watch, allowing you to choose from a ton of options and customize the end result exactly to your liking. interface.
You can now set the photo surface to display a single photo or rotate up to 6 photos of your choice. You can also ask it to randomly browse the photo collection on your phone, whether it’s all the photos in your photo album, or an automatically generated collection, such as people, nature, or cities.
Unfortunately, you have to create new photo faces through your phone; the watch itself can’t do this.
Photo credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
According to Apple, the Photos interface will “intelligently analyze” the photos in your library and select “the best composition, framing, and image quality” for your watch. It’s not always perfect, especially when you’re choosing from images with unusual aspect ratios, but the new faces seem to do a good job of selecting points of focus.
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You can also choose the size of the time indicator from a variety of options from small to extra large, as well as a special “Dynamic” setting that changes the text size to best fit your photo. You can also choose the font and script of the time indicator, change the style of the overall appearance through options such as natural, black and white, monotone, duotone, etc., and set the color tone of the photo and time indicator.
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Finally, you can place two complications on the Photos side, one at the top and one at the bottom.
All of this gives your watch a very powerful and versatile interface that can be as simple as showing you a photo of your family, but you can also create quite complex settings using all the options provided. To illustrate this point, I (hastily, please don’t judge) created an animated watch face that cycles through various “gun barrel” images from the James Bond movies.
If you’re prepared to spend some time tweaking, the new Photos interface opens up a lot of possibilities.
Photo credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
The only downside to the new photo interface is that it’s one of the interfaces you can’t create or fully configure on the watch. Instead, you need to open the Watch app on your iPhone, tap “New Watch Face,” select the “Photos” watch face, and set it up from there. Fortunately, most of the options are available on the watch in addition to the selection of the photo itself; to edit a face, long-press on the face and select Edit.
