Everything you can expect from Apple's new iPhone lock screen settings.

By John Kennedy | Updated Sep 25, 2022 9:00 AM

This story has been updated. It was originally published on September 12, 2022.

Apple’s newest iPhone operating system, iOS 16, features a completely reimagined lock screen customization process. You can shuffle photos, change font style and color, add helpful widgets, and uh, turn your security screen into a dizzying vortex of crabs, if that’s your thing.

There’s a lot to dig into within the hefty update, but before you get bogged down in the details, take a few minutes to mess around with the lock screen settings. At the very least, a fresh new look for your handheld distraction box should add a little bit of excitement to your day.

If your phone doesn’t automatically download the update or prompt you to do so, get started by opening the settings app, tapping General, and selecting Software Update. You’ll have the option to download and install iOS 15.7 or Upgrade to iOS 16. Choose the latter to get the brand new lock screen customization features.

Once you install iOS 16, open the settings app and go to Wallpaper. Under the images of your current lock screen and home screen wallpapers, you’ll see Add New Wallpaper. Tap that to start building something new.

You can, of course, edit your two active screens from the main wallpaper settings page (via Customize under each one), but you won’t be able to change the background style. That means if it’s a photo, you won’t be able to have it display the weather, an absurd emoji pattern, or anything else—you’ll only be able to change the pic.

The only way to choose from all available styles is to add a new wallpaper. Plus, there are more efficient ways to edit all your lock and home screens, not just the most recent ones. We’ll get to that later.

The Add New Wallpaper menu offers a slew of options. You’ll see a list of all available styles at the top, but the page also contains a number of featured presets Apple thinks you might like. These include several custom designs, suggested photos from your phone, and color gradients, but they’re all variations on iOS 16’s main wallpaper styles, and you can do better. This is the DIY section, after all.

Setting a photo as your phone’s background is a classic move, and it’s the first visible choice on iOS 16’s wallpaper creation screen. Tap Photos from the row at the top of the screen, and you’ll have the option to dig through All your photos or browse those Apple has grouped under tags like Featured, People, Nature, and Cities. (The People tag here and the People option on the main screen lead to the same place.) If you’ve painstakingly organized your phone’s photo library, toggle the switch at the top of the screen to Albums to dig through your well-curated catalog.

You can also use the search bar here to hunt down something specific, including words in images. That means if you enter “New York,” your iPhone’s Live Text feature will dredge up any photos of the “Welcome to New York” highway sign you may have taken, screenshots of text messages where you mention the state, and pics Apple knows you snapped within its borders.

[Related: Smartphone security starts with the lock screen. Here’s how to protect it.]

Once you’ve made your choice, you can edit your lock screen photo. Pinch the screen to crop it by zooming in and out, but know that you can’t make the image smaller than the screen. Don’t like how it looks? Tap the photos icon in the bottom left (a stylized rectangular portrait of mountains) to find another one.

With a pic in place, swipe to the left to choose from four filters: natural, black and white, duotone, and color wash. The first two are self-explanatory, and the latter pair cover the original image with different-colored tints.

Finally, tap the three dots in the bottom right to see if you can activate Depth Effect. This won’t be available with all photos, as it pulls whatever’s in the picture’s foreground out in front of the clock and any widgets you may have on your lock screen. Behold: depth. If the foreground selection will cover too much of your clock and/or widgets (maybe about 50 percent), you won’t be able to use this feature.

New to iOS 16 is the ability to slap a rotating selection of images onto your lock or home screen. Tap Photo Shuffle from the options at the top of the main wallpaper customization menu to start. Find Shuffle Frequency in the middle of the page and tap on it to decide if you want the pictures to change On Tap, On Lock, Hourly, or Daily. The last two are self-explanatory, while On Tap will allow you to change the lock screen display any time you touch it, and On Lock will move to the next image whenever you lock your phone—even if you haven’t unlocked it.

From there, you have two choices: Use Featured Photos or Select Photos Manually. For full customization, pick the latter, and tap or drag to select multiple photos for your background. Hit Add in the top right corner of the screen to move on.

If you’d rather use Apple’s featured images from your photo library, tap People, Nature, Cities, and any other options to add or remove those groups of images. Touch Choose next to People, and you’ll be able to tap on thumbnails of people’s faces to decide which ones show up in the shuffle—hit Done to finish. When you’re ready, tap Use Featured Photos to continue.

Whether you used Apple’s selections or picked manually, the editing process is essentially the same as the one described above for a singular pic. Just tap the screen to move from photo to photo.

While editing, the three dots in the bottom right will let you set the shuffle frequency if you missed it on the first page or decided to change your mind. If you chose your own images, you’ll also have the option to enable Depth Effect, but not if you went with the featured pics. Instead, you’ll see Don’t Feature Photo—tap this to cut anything you don’t like.

The icon in the bottom left will be different depending on if you chose your images manually or not. If you did, it’s a grid of six rectangles—tap it to Add Photos to your rotation or Select the ones already there. Highlight one or more existing images, and you’ll see a trash can icon. You can touch that to remove any pics you’d rather not use. Run with Apple’s featured photos, and the icon will be a stack of rectangles with a sparkle icon on them. It will let you change the categories included in your shuffle.

Personally, I found this choice to be the most chaotic, but there’s a lot of room for customization. Tap Emoji from the main wallpaper creation menu, and you’ll be able to type up to six emojis that will display in a pattern on your lock and home screens. When you’re ready, tap above the emoji entry menu or hit the X in its top right corner to continue.

Swipe left to choose from six available patterns, from grids of various sizes to a hypnotic spiral. Tap the smiley face icon in the bottom left to change your emoji selection, or hit the three dots in the bottom right to adjust the background color.

The Weather, Astronomy, and Color options are the most basic wallpaper options available, though that doesn’t mean they’re uninteresting. Tap Weather, for instance, and your wallpaper will be a slightly animated depiction of whatever the weather is where you are, but that’s it.

Astronomy is a little deeper, as you’ll be able to choose from Earth (a view of our planet suspended in space), Earth Detail (where about a quarter of the visible hemisphere fills most of the screen), the same two options for the moon, and Solar System (which shows all the planets and their orbits around the sun).

[Related: Why is Pluto no longer a planet?]

Color is fairly self-explanatory: You choose a color, adjust its hue with the slider at the bottom of the screen, and pick from one of six gradient options. If you don’t like the what it looks like, hit the colored circle in the bottom left to pick again.

No matter which wallpaper style you chose, the clock will be the next-largest piece of your lock screen. You should customize that too—everything’s part of your new aesthetic. Tap the time and choose from one of eight fonts and countless colors, including making the digits opaque (the first color option on the left). You’ll only see 15 colored dots across the bottom of the screen, but if you’re not feeling any of them, the final one on the right will let you pick colors from a grid or spectrum, or plug in a specific color hex code to get exactly what you want.

Within the Font & Color menu, there’s a globe icon in the top left corner. Tap this, and you’ll be able to choose whether your clock displays Arabic numerals (the ones used everywhere in this article), Arabic Indic numerals (used in parts of the Arab world), or Devanagari numerals (used in northern Indian languages).

If you hate being reminded of the constant march of time, sorry, you can’t remove the clock. What you can do, however, is try to get the color to match the wallpaper so those anxiety-inducing digits disappear partially or completely.

There are two places you can place widgets on your iPhone’s lock screen: above and below the clock. The thin space at the top of your screen will likely display the date by default, but you can tap it to select another widget instead.

The main widget area is below the clock, and it will hold up to four (or none, if you really don’t want to obscure your lock screen photo). Just tap where it says Add Widgets, and you can choose from the options available. No matter how many you choose, they’ll stay centered in the space, and you can remove any you don’t like by tapping the minus icon at its top left corner. To reorder them, press and hold a widget until it grows a little under your finger, then drag it where you want it to go. One wrinkle: if you choose a widget that takes up two of the four spaces, it will always display on the left—you can’t move it. 

Most widget options will be available in both places, though you may see some exceptions. The battery widget, for example, can only go underneath the clock, where it will show how much juice is left in your phone or any connected devices.

[Related: 4 tips to make your phone battery last longer]

You’ll also be able to fine-tune most widgets by tapping on them to choose from varying amounts of display options. The reminder widget, for example, will only show you the next thing you have due each day, while the weather widget offers a wide selection of data visualizations.

One note on this: it’s annoyingly difficult to customize widgets in the upper section. There, you can only adjust a widget immediately after putting it in place. If you do something else and come back, you won’t be able to tweak it. So if you’re wondering why your clock widget is stuck displaying the time in Cupertino, California, not, say, your parents’ hometown, you’ll have to choose another widget, tap elsewhere, touch the upper widget area again, choose the clock widget, and immediately tap it to pick a specific city. Gross.

Thankfully, this obnoxious workaround isn’t necessary in the main widget section under the time, where you can touch and customize any widget whenever you want. 

And if you’re wondering why your weather widget won’t work, it’s because you turned your location off in the weather app settings. To fix that, open the main iPhone settings app, go to Weather, Location, and select While Using the App or Widgets, Always, or While Using the App. With these options on, you can still turn Precise Location off for a little bit of privacy. Doing so means your weather app can only determine your approximate location (it was about four miles away from me).

Finally, hit the X or tap outside of the widget menu to set your selections.

When everything looks perfect, hit Add in the top right corner of your screen. To apply your fresh new lock screen to your home screen too, tap Set as Wallpaper Pair on the next screen. If you’d rather have all your app icons display on top of something else, choose Customize Home Screen to adjust the color or pick a new photo for what’s essentially your phone’s interior wallpaper.

If you told your phone to use a wallpaper pair but the home screen isn’t working, it may be inadvertently blurred. To fix this, go to the main wallpaper settings screen, tap Customize under your home screen, and hit Blur. This should solve the problem.

There are two ways to edit your wallpaper, but the most useful one is directly from your phone’s lock screen. To start, press the center of your lock screen to bring up the passcode entry keypad. If the keypad doesn’t show up and you have to swipe up to get to it, you’ll go to your home screen, not the wallpaper editing menu.

Do it right, though, and you’ll see a scrollable carousel of available wallpapers. Hit Customize to edit whichever one is front and center. You can also add a new wallpaper by going all the way right and selecting Add New or by tapping the blue plus icon in the bottom right.

To delete a wallpaper, find it in the carousel and swipe up. Then tap the trash can icon and hit Delete This Wallpaper. Easy.

Finally, you can assign each wallpaper to a specific Focus, a feature that arrived with iOS 15. Just tap Focus at the bottom of any wallpaper to choose the one you want. If you hit Focus Settings at the bottom of the screen, you’ll go to that page in the settings app, closing the wallpaper customization screen. You can also choose a Focus wallpaper by opening the settings app, selecting Focus, and tapping one of the Focuses to Choose its matching lock and home screen.

Phew, that’s all there is to say about the new iOS 16 lock screen settings and customization features. You may want to queue up all of these possibilities like outfits in a virtual closet, or you may just want to keep that cute photo of your partner or dog. Either way, at least now you know that a vaguely threatening spiral of crab emojis is also an option.

John Kennedy is PopSci's DIY editor. He previously covered legal news for Law360 and, before that, local news at the Journal Inquirer in Connecticut. He has also built and remodeled houses, worked as a fencing coach, and shelved books at a library. When he's not taking things apart or putting them back together, he's playing sports, cooking, baking, or immersed in a video game. Contact the author here.

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