Want more exciting photos on your iPhone? Google’s Snapseed app brings retro film vibes to your shots

Google’s long-running Snapseed photo editor has been quietly popular with enthusiasts for years, thanks to its surprisingly powerful tools, and the fact that it doesn’t nag you for a subscription. 

It’s been available on Android and iPhone for ages, but until now, it’s essentially been an editor first. You’d shoot a photo in your phone’s standard camera app, then open Snapseed afterwards to tweak colours, contrast or apply one of its stylised filters. But the latest app update changes that, promising to add an extra layer of fun to your iPhone camera.

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Snapseed 3.15.0, now available on the Apple App Store, adds a proper in-app camera to the iPhone version, complete with manual ISO, shutter speed and focus controls. Toggle on Pro mode and, you get a satisfying dial to tweak exposure yourself, rather than letting Apple’s vanilla camera app do all the thinking.

But the headline feature isn’t just the manual controls. It’s the retrotastic film simulations.

Snapseed has long included filters like Vintage, Grainy Film and Retrolux in its editor. What’s new here is the ability to apply more faithful film-inspired emulations in real time as you shoot, rather than adding them afterwards.

The new camera includes film emulation styles inspired by classic stocks like Kodak Portra, Kodak Gold, Fuji Superia, Fuji Pro 400H, Agfa Optima, Polaroid 600 and even Technicolor. And if you’re not deep into photography lore, here’s why that matters:

Back when cameras used actual, honest-to-goodness film, the roll you loaded shaped the entire look of your photos. Portra became known for soft, flattering skin tones. Gold leaned warm and nostalgic, and Superia pushed greens and blues in a way that became instantly recognisable, to name but a few examples.

Then digital photography rocked up, and flattened a lot of that personality. Film emulation tries to bring it back – recreating the colour response, contrast and subtle grain of those classic stocks.

It’s a concept that Fujifilm has built entire camera systems around. Its modern mirrorless cameras famously include Film Simulation modes based on decades of analogue colour science, and plenty of photographers shoot straight JPEG because they like those built-in looks so much, building up the brand’s massive enthusiast following.

Now, Snapseed is aiming to do something similar on your iPhone. In the app, you can switch between film styles in real time while framing your shot, complete with a playful rewind animation when changing rolls. And unlike slapping on a filter after a shot’s taken, every photo retains a full editing stack, meaning you can fine-tune or completely change the look later.

There are also viewfinder colour themes and support for your own saved Looks, giving you full creative control to tweak the visuals as you see fit.

Obviously, a mere app can’t magically turn your iPhone into a full-blown Fujifilm snapper, and it doesn’t replace Apple’s (excellent) computational photography tricks either. But if you find your default iPhone images a little too clean or clinical, Snapseed’s new camera gives you a different flavour – and it does it for free.

As for those of us not rocking an iPhone, Google says it’s also working on bringing the redesigned editor experience to Android, though no firm date has been revealed.

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