Whatever creative talent I possess stops well short of being able to draw anything more elaborate than a stick figure, and that cuts down on my ability to pull off any sort of craft involving artwork. We've got a Thanksgiving dinner coming up, and I thought about maybe greeting guests with a printed menu containing fun drawings of the dishes they were going to be served, but then I remembered that would require me to suddenly pick up art skills that eluded me the previous five decades of my life.
But then I also thought of Image Playground, the image generation feature that's coming to the iPhone as part of the iOS 18.2 update.
As a reminder, Image Playground is part of Apple Intelligence, Apple's suite of AI-powered tools that are coming to Macs, iPads and iPhones. With Image Playground, you provide a text prompt and the AI feature produces an image based on your instructions. While not officially part of iOS 18 yet, Image Playground is part of the iOS 18.2 public beta that's available to anyone enrolled in Apple's beta software program.
Image Playground sounded like the perfect solution to my drawing dilemma. Instead of having to settle for my uninspired etchings, I could create a fun Thanksgiving menu with images whipped up by my iPhone based on my careful instructions. I decided to give Image Playground a try to see if it was the tool I needed as a sidekick for pulling off creative projects like this.
As it turns out, Image Playground is not that tool, at least not in its current form. But playing around with this generative AI tool gave me a good sense of the things Image Playground can do very well and where it's got room to grow.
Before we dive into the whys and wherefores of my Image Playground experience, it's important to remember that this is beta software that figures to see tweaks and improvements over time. Beyond that, you'd imagine that Apple's AI models are going to get smarter and more fully featured over time, expanding what Image Playground can do. Even with the limitations I ran into, I still think this generative AI tool shows a lot of promise.
So let's take Image Playground out for a test spin.
Getting started with Image Playground
Image Playground is a standalone app that appears on your iPhone after you've installed iOS 18.2. You can't fire it up and start generating images right away — the first time you launch Image Playground, you'll have to sign up with Apple as a beta tester. It took several days for my approval to come through, and others I've talked to have had similar waits. But once that notification from Apple comes through, you're ready to get started.
We've got a guide on how to use Image Playground, but essentially, there's a text field where you can input what you want to create. To help get you familiar with using the app, Apple has supplied a bunch of suggestions such as themes, costumes, places and more.
Unlike other AI image generators, you don't necessarily get your best results by typing out a long phrase like "me sitting around a Thanksgiving table surrounded by turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie." Rather, I had my best success with Image Playground by building an image piecemeal.
Start with a person — there's a handy Person button right next to the text field with the names and faces of people you've tagged in your image library from the Photos app. Image Playground will whip up an image of that person, which you can then augment by adding more to the image, either with text prompts or by tapping one of Apple's supplied suggestions.
When you think about it, Image Playground uses a very Apple-like approach to AI-powered image generation. Much like the iPhone's Shortcuts app turns programming into a visual process where you add on different steps, Image Playground makes it easy to tweak your image by adding and removing different suggestions. The app's layout features a glowing Siri-like ball that displays your image in progress surrounded by the different inputs you've added. Don't like the look of your image? Just tap the offending input to make it go away.
It's an approach that invites tinkering, and that's the best aspect of Image Playground. You can really get into fine-tuning your image, adding and subtracting elements until what's on the screen matches the idea in your head.
Tinkering is also a pleasure in Image Playground because the image generation happens so quickly. That's a byproduct of Apple's decision to have as many Apple Intelligence features happen on your device as possible. It also eases my mind that I'm not helping burn down a rainforest by having an external server somewhere whip up an image of me in chef's whites surrounded by turkeys.
You will have to get used to some inconsistencies with how Image Playground responds to your prompts. Typing in "turkey," for example, yields a message that Image Playground is unable to use that description. "Turkeys," however, works just fine. This is the sort of trial-by-error approach you're going to run into with a new program, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
A lot of limitations
A bigger issue for Image Playground, at least at this point in its evolution, is how limited the app is. For starters, you can only choose between two image styles — animation or illustration. My colleague Ryan Morrison says that's likely a limit Apple took on when it insisted upon making Image Playground run on device, as those are two of the easier styles to handle. It's a fair trade-off to make, but it does means your images are going to start to feel similar the more you use the app.
That air of familiarity gets exacerbated by the fact that Image Playground really wants to create portraits of you, your family and your friends. You can try to create images without someone being the main focus, but the aspect ratio is definitely geared toward putting someone's face front and center.
At least Image Editor is very good at creating portraits, particularly in the animation style, which gives everyone a Pixar-like makeover. My wife hates most attempts to capture her for posterity, but she really liked the look Image Playground gave her. (The field full of grazing turkeys behind her, not so much.) My teenage daughter was less thrilled with her portrait, which was based on a photo from when she was younger and had shorter hair, but a second attempt with longer locks gained some grudging teen approval. I'm all right with my image, though Image Playground struggles with graying beards — it's given me a half-goatee that looks like I should be in a low-rent 1990s wrestling promotion.
I'm somewhat surprised that Image Playground can't do group shots — or at least, I've yet to find the magic formula to get it to include me and my family members in a group image that I would have used at the top of my Thanksgiving menu. I even tried using a photo of me and my daughter to get Image Playground to animate the two of us — alas, the tool only focused one me, the less cute option.
There's another limitation to Image Playground, and it's probably the most severe at this point — you don't have much of a say in the size and shape of what Image Playground generates. Everything gets produced in the same square shape, limiting what you can ultimately do with the image. You could export it to an image editor for cropping and resizing, I suppose, but that seems to defeat the no-hassle approach to image generation that makes Image Playground so appealing to begin with. At the very least, I wish the app supported the Visual Look Up capability that lets you press and hold on the subject of an image to lift it out of a photo.
Perhaps, that kind of addition will come to Image Playground at a later date. But until you can do something with the images created that's better integrated with other apps on your iPhone, this tool has limited appeal.
Image Playground and my Thanksgiving project
So ultimately, my dream of creating a stylish Thanksgiving menu populated with fun illustrations generated with the help of Image Playground didn't quite pan out. I tried to make a rough draft of a menu in Notes with some images pasted in here and there, but the fact that I'd be stuck with square images made me decide it wasn't worth using a more sophisticated app like Pages to tweak fonts and spruce up the look of the document.
Maybe Image Playground couldn't help me with this specific project, but spending some time using the app to create various images gave me a better idea of what it can and can't do. A lot of the roadblocks I ran into like the limitations on styles and the app's occasional inability to understand a text prompt are the sort of things that will get worked out over time.
The more pressing question is what can you use Image Editor for? Right now, it seems best suited for making avatars and the occasional fun cartoon to share with family and friends via Messages or Mail. To go beyond that is going to require some greater flexibility, and that's going to take a little patience while we wait for Apple to boost Image Playground's functionality.
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