iPhone 17 makes landscape selfies easier
If you have ever tried to take a group selfie or capture a wide background with the front-facing iPhone camera, you probably remember the awkward part: turning the phone sideways and hoping you don't drop it. iPhone 17 fixes this in a simple but important way. It introduces a square FaceTime camera sensor, which means your iPhone can take tall or wide photos at the same picture quality without rotating your phone.
This change sounds small, but it makes taking selfies far more comfortable, especially for people who prefer holding their phone vertically.
Previous iPhones used a vertical rectangular front camera sensor, matching the shape of your phone’s screen. To take a wide selfie, you had to rotate the phone into landscape mode. That often meant using two hands or twisting your wrist in an uncomfortable way.
iPhone 17 uses a square-shaped sensor instead. This starts with a large square photo, and then you can choose to save it as a tall photo or a wide one. Because the camera captures more image area in all directions, the phone no longer needs to be rotated to get a landscape selfie. And your resulting photo isn’t reduced in quality the way cropping it would have.
In practical terms, you can now:
Hold your iPhone normally, in an upright position
Take a wide, landscape selfie
Fit more people or background into the frame
No phone twisting required.
To manually switch orientation, just tap the rotating photo icon at the bottom of your image preview.
It also pairs nicely with Apple’s Center Stage feature, which can automatically widen the shot when it detects more people. You just hold the phone and smile, and the camera does the adjusting.
