How to age a photo on iPhone, step by step

Step by step

• Shoot in even, indirect light — a window in front of you, not behind you. Hard side light bakes shadows that the model will read as face shape.
• Face the camera straight on. Three-quarter angles are the most common cause of a result that does not look like you.
• Remove obstructions: hair off the face, glasses off if you can, no hand near the jaw.
• Turn off beauty filters and skin smoothing. They erase the texture the age model needs, and smoothed inputs age badly.
• Pick the target age or decade, and generate one age at a time if the app supports it — a per-age generation gives a genuinely different face per decade instead of one effect at increasing strength.
• Compare against the original with a slider rather than side-by-side thumbnails; misalignment is what makes fakes obvious.
• Export at full resolution before sharing. Re-compressing a screenshot of a screenshot is what makes shared results look plastic.

If the result does not look like you

• Re-shoot straight on before blaming the model.
• Try a photo with visible skin texture rather than your most flattering one.
• Drop the target age by one step: extreme jumps amplify identity drift.
• Check that the face fills a reasonable part of the frame; tiny faces in wide shots lose the detail the model conditions on.

Doing it for a specific occasion

The two occasions people actually do this for are birthdays and reunions — a card that shows the person at 80, or a group of friends aged together. If you are aging someone else's photo, ask them first. It is their face, and in some jurisdictions face data carries specific consent rules.

Sources: Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14)

The timeline view puts every decade next to each other, which is the format people actually share.