The latest versions of iOS for iPhone include an excellent Magnifier feature which can turn the iPhone camera and screen into a magnifying glass. This has many potential uses, but perhaps the most useful in day-to-day life is as a reading aid to read tiny text without squinting and straining your eyes. Instead, you can quickly access the iPhone camera magnifier to zoom into and clarify what you are looking at, just like a real magnifying glass.

The iPhone Magnifier ability must be enabled before it can be used, and then it’s easily to access from anywhere. There are even various adjustments that can be made to the magnifier once it has been accessed, including to zoom level, brightness, contrast, and different color filters as well.


Magnifier on iPhone requires a modern version of iOS, the iPhone must be on iOS 10.0 or newer to have the feature available. Update the iOS version if you wish to have the feature and currently don’t.

How to Enable iPhone Magnifier Camera

Before you can use Magnifier it must be enabled in settings:

1. Open the “Settings” app on iPhone and go to “General” and then to “Accessibility”
2. Tap on “Magnifier” and then toggle the switch next to “Magnifier” to the ON position
3. Exit out of Settings
4. To access the iPhone magnifying lens, triple-click the Home button
5. Tap the camera button to freeze the screen on the magnified item

Now that Magnifier is enabled, you can access it from the Locked screen of iPhone, the Home Screen, or anywhere else with the triple-click on the Home button.

Using the iPhone Magnifying Camera Lens

After you have enabled the iPhone Magnifier feature, you can use it anytime easily:

1. Access the iPhone magnifier by triple-clicking the Home button
2. Adjust the zoom level on Magnifier with the slider as necessary
3. Optionally, adjust the Magnifier filters:
• Brightness – increase or decrease brightness of the magnifier camera
• Contrast – increase or decrease the contrast of the magnifier
• None – no color filter
• White / Blue – filter colors to whites and blues
• Yellow / Blue – filter colors to yellow and blue
• Yellow / Black – filter colors to yellow and black
• Red / Black – filter colors to red and black
• Invert – invert colors, or invert/reverse filter colors
4. Tap the round camera button to freeze the magnifier screen on the subject, tap again to discard and start over
5. Exit iPhone Magnifier by pressing the Home button again

Note the iPhone Magnifier is completely different from the photography related features of iPhone camera, as it’s not intended to take pictures with. When you tap the camera button it does not actually save the picture, it just freezes the magnified item on the screen so that you can focus on it, read it, zoom, pan, or adjust was needed. This feature is available on all modern iPhone devices, and while the Plus models can use the same 2x optical zoom camera lens all iPhone with the Magnifier feature enabled can use digital zoom to magnify subjects further, just like you can zoom with the regular iPhone camera.

This is a really great iPhone feature, particularly if you wear corrective lenses or you’re human and have a hard time reading micro fonts that too often are printed on anything from packaging to labels. If you enjoy the iPhone magnifier tip, don’t forget to show it to friends and relatives too, they’ll likely appreciate it just the same!

Mac users have a similar feature available in Preview app to zoom into pictures, and also OS-wide with a little zoom window utility, though neither of which uses the Mac camera as these features on the Mac only apply to what is on screen.