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I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world: > Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with App
by quinncom 7d ago
I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world:
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.5 Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.
- cavoirom 7d agoYes, this is really a "Pro" feature, while C2PA exists, not many consumer products have it, iPhone will be the game changer for reporters.
- kllrnohj 7d agoReporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc... The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
- reaperducer 7d agoReporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc... So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
- drdrey 7d agoyou could do edits like crops in a way that preserves the signature using ZK proofs
- cavoirom 7d agoYou want to do all that, then still can prove the picture is authentic. The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... it's not about preventing editing, it's about proving the authenticity when needed.
- kllrnohj 7d ago> The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... That's not a thing. Straight from Apple: "When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image. Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image" So this only helps prove anything if you can share the original, unedited image. You can share it alongside an edited one, but you must also be comfortable sharing the unedited original if you want to prove you own an iPhone 18 Pro. Er, I mean prove it's "authentic" Now I think C2PA had allowances for what you're talking about, but that also ended up resulting in it being easier to break.
- Schiendelman 7d agoYou don't need to share the original image with everyone, just like how journalists don't share their audio recordings from interviews with everyone. You share with an editor. Or a court.
- kllrnohj 5d agoYes, which is why this doesn't really do much. Readers still have to primarily rely on trust for whether or not they believe the news and who is reporting it.
- Schiendelman 5d agoThere's no situation with any technology where you would not have to do that.
- xattt 7d ago*Not available in EU or China. I wonder what the common thread is.
- rock_artist 7d ago> I wonder what the common thread is. Regulation. For China I would assume like other services, if there's some cloud involved, it should be on Chinese soil and accessible to China. For EU harder to guess, but again the lock-in with "Private Cloud Computing" feels related.
- speedgoose 7d agoIt could be because a digital signature could be use to track without consent.
- dannyw 7d agoNah, it’s an optional feature, so by using it you provide express consent. GDPR gives users more data ownership; GDPR does not stop you from choosing to do what you want with your data. It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
- andrewmutz 7d agoCan't I just point my camera at an AI generated image? And it will get the stamp of authenticity?
- llukas 7d agoStamp only proves you did the photo and probably some metadata like when where etc. It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
- lokar 7d agowhat is it missing then?
- intrasight 7d agoThe credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with a kitten photo.
- Gigachad 7d agoI think this is where we are headed. This feature seems useless on it's own since someone will eventually find a way to extract the key from the iphone and sign any image. But if they could make it so every iphone uses it's own key and the photos show "Taken by xyz" and it's linked to their icloud or identity somehow. That way images shared around will still be able to be linked to a source that you can choose to trust and the viewer can know it wasn't modified from what that person shot. Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.
- intrasight 7d agoI don't think we'll treat them as fake but they would probably undergo more scrutiny - perhaps in a crowd-sourced manner that provides an overall score of probable legitimacy.
- whatever1 7d agoI wish next year for videos too. We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
- FireBeyond 7d agoCanon's original high end digital models had this as a feature, that your images could be digitally signed in-camera based on raw sensor data. Primarily for law enforcement. Obviously a far broarder use case, now.
- spacebanana7 7d agoThe weakness of this is that a person can take a picture of a high resolution screen or print. We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
- awkwardleon 7d agoAgree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
- Gigachad 7d agoI hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
- snypher 7d agoHow does this actually work though? 1) I see a photo online and doubt it's provenance 2) I contact the photographer and ask to see their cloud image (???!) 2a) I borrow someone's mac to download the image (.jpg?) and it can be verified on that?
- spacebanana7 7d agoIdeally it’d be linked to public key on a DNS txt record or similar, and trustworthy clients (including social media apps) show the domain linked to the photo.
- apetresc 7d agoI don’t know too much about image processing, but my intuition tells me that distinguishing a photo of a 3d scene from a photo of a photo of a 3d scene is a much easier engineering problem than distinguishing it from an AI-generated diffusion. So even just reducing the problem to the former is still a worthy accomplishment.
- deleted 7d ago
- lern_too_spel 7d agoFinally. Android phones have been shipping with C2PA since last year, so it's great that the final holdout has capitulated, though with its own set of nonstandard tools. https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-trusted-images-c2pa-content-credentials.html?m=1 https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste... https://c2paviewer.com/supported-devices https://c2paviewer.com/supported-devices
- nxc18 7d agoThe Android version is useless though, TBD if Apple can do better. https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
- lern_too_spel 7d agoIndeed, on top of Google's implementation being a bad joke, it sounds like the C2PA specifications in general are a massive fail so far. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1 On the other hand, ignoring standards altogether is the wrong way to go because the ecosystem after capture won't be there.
- sheepybloke 7d agoOn the opposite side, this read to me like there was so much image processing going on in the background and off device that they felt like they needed to prove that there was a real image backing the creation, and that it was not all AI. It really begs the question of what the extent is of image processing.
- Gigachad 7d agoThe iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
- whimsicalism 7d agothere is definitely some generative pixel stuff in the iOS pipeline as i've noticed garbled deepdream-esque letters when zooming before
- Gigachad 7d agoThat could be a result of a failed exposure stack. Phone sensors and lenses suck for light gathering so they have to take multiple photos and merge them together to create one that's less noisy. Occasionally you get artifacts where the merge failed. It's still distinct from actual AI generation imo.
- Schiendelman 7d agoThis is correct (from someone who has worked on software to do this). Processing images for the 3D walkthroughs in real estate sometimes does this too.
- siva7 7d agoA mobile phone.. an internet communicator.. a music player.. don't you get it? well, steve, actually 18 years later it's a .. camera
- Frost1x 7d agoHow will this work against rehosted images on all the platforms people actually share photos from? It’s a good feature but many popular services apply metadata stripping and basic image adjustment before resharing. That seems like the place where people would actually want to verify authenticity.
- cavoirom 7d agoIt works for the author of the image who want to prove the authenticity, and the party that publishing the image who want to maintain the trust.
- tclancy 7d agoThat smells like "show don't tell", but who knows.
- Melatonic 7d agoSo does that mean only the main sensor can do this ?
- Schiendelman 7d agoYes.
- bilekas 7d agoThat's more of a software feature..
- ikr678 7d agoCynical take: A single photo to now consume up 50mb of cloud storage, adding to the demand for more data centers that supported the creation of this authenticity issue in the first place.
- galkk 7d agolol, called it month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011
- no_time 7d agoFeels like the only ones who'd benefit from this are AI companies that are afraid of tainting their post 2023 datasets with their own slop. On the other hand if this becomes mandated by law I can see it become treacherous for endusers.
- lxgr 7d agoIt also sounds pretty useful for anyone involved in a lawsuit to be able to present photographic evidence again. I’m sure GenAI is already a big headache for forensics, and enforcing AI watermarks will clearly not be bulletproof.
- Good4boothee 7d agoWill it ever work until a TPM like module is directly integrated into camera sensor? Older attempts of Nikon and Canon got broken, same had happened with C2PA implementation for Android - if it gets anywhere close to CPU it is insecure.
- lxgr 7d agoYes, presumably there will be a cat and mouse game until the entire system including all peripherals has been brought into the trusted computing base, either physically or logically (usually with secured/authenticated communication). This has been the case for all applications of trusted computing. Security is never a binary property, however, and can usually be better expressed in terms of how expensive it would be to subvert a given mechanism. "This image is either authentic or would have cost at least $x to fake" is already much more useful than nothing at all even without $x trending to infinity.
- Lockal 7d ago> I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
- knollimar 7d agoAre the yellow dots not opt in?
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- kenferry 6d agoI think the big difference here is that it's opt-in, off by default, and also not included with shared images by default. This is a feature because you use it when you WANT to be able to demonstrate an image wasn't altered / was yours, like for a journalist. This is an actual question, not a dig: what do you mean by non-removable?
- QuantumNomad_ 7d ago> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam? https://www.procamapp.com/ https://www.procamapp.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procam-5/id6787737491?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procam-5/id6787737491?mt=8
- FinnKuhn 7d agoNot available in EU. The reason Siri AI and other iOS features are not available in the EU is the issue of Apple not opening up the same API for other apps. Therefore I think it might be the same case here, which would mean that third-party camera apps wouldn't be compatible.
- bluber84 7d agoThis feature is not enabled in the eu
- Schiendelman 7d agoYeah, because GDPR and AI laws in the EU conflict with each other and they haven't resolved it yet.
- vrighter 6d agowtf is a private cloud compute?