iOS 17 Feature Question: Take me to this photo.

This week we heard about a new way Apple plans to keep the iPhone 14 Pro always on with iOS 17. If you want your iPhone to offer more information panels on the surface, well, you’re in luck.

I hope there are more updates to customize the standard lock screen. There is one thing I hope changes in iOS 17, especially the lock screen version of Photo Shuffle in iOS 16.

It’s great that Apple can recreate photos from your library and still see them in context. The PhotoShovel lock screen is not one of those examples.

Make no mistake. It’s a great feature. I recently started using Photo Shuffle as a lock screen that pulls in photos of my kids and rotates them every hour. Not every photo makes for a great wallpaper, but I’m always happy when he finds which ones.

Sometimes it shows a photo that I think is particularly good to use. Other times he chooses photos that are funny in context but shouldn’t be used for long.

There were plenty of opportunities to embarrass my kids by showing them which photo was up for the hour. Often, I show them a wonderful memory of when they were very young.

In fact, the Photo Shovel lock screen was surprisingly good at pulling up photos from my library that I wanted to display.

Sometimes cropping someone’s face in a group shot can make for a great portrait. These are the ones I want to dig out of my photo library, duplicate and crop.

However, as far as I can tell, and I hope I’m wrong, there is no way to go from the PhotoShovel lock screen to a photo in your library. My solution is to go back and take a screenshot of the lock screen to remember to hunt down that photo. You can also view photos of specific people based on faces, but it’s still a hunt to find the exact photo you’re looking for.

If I’m right in thinking I’m not wrong, I hope this is something Apple took into account when developing iOS 17. I’m pretty late to the experience, but I’m sure many others have already noticed.

Update! A wish has come true! There is a way! Five taps is cluttered and probably too much, so after one long press, a photo icon next to a custom button might work better.