Image Playground has been an app on your iPhone ever since last year’s iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence, and it’s designed to create fun images for you. But it’s quite often not the best image creation tool – especially when there are really powerful options online like ChatGPT.

Well, in iOS 26, Image Playground can now tap into ChatGPT to create far better images than it ever could before.

To get started, all we’re going to do is tap on the Styles button at the top of Image Playground. And then the last option now says ChatGPT. When you tap on here, you get a secret panel of extra options. These are different styles that can be applied to your ChatGPT images.

I’m going to go for Vector to begin with – but we’ll try another one in a second.

Then, Image Playground works just like before. I’m going to select myself in the corner, and you can see it’s going to ask me for permission to share that image with ChatGPT. Then I can either type in descriptors at the bottom, or I can choose some options from the screen.

So I’m going to go for summer, and type in green baseball cap. And let’s put ice lolly in there as well – or popsicle if you’re watching in America.

Then ChatGPT is going to get to work. And I’ll warn you now – this takes a lot longer than it does with the on-device Apple Intelligence. I’m going to quickly edit and jump ahead, but I’m literally cutting about a minute of waiting here – that’s how long it takes.

But when it finishes, you can see the high quality of that image compared to what Image Playground would have made before. This is a really fun cartoon-style sticker.

I can then change the style at the top – just like in normal Image Playground – and let’s go for Anime this time. Again, I’m going to cut about a minute of waiting here.

And boom – there you go. The same image, but in an anime style.

Of course, we can still make changes and tweaks. For example, I can get rid of the word ice lolly, and now I’ve just got myself in the summer wearing that baseball cap.

And don’t forget, you can save any of these images in the top right corner – and then you can use them anywhere else on your device.

So, Image Playground has got a lot better with iOS 26. Still not the best app in the world, but it can be a really easy way to create some images rather than going to a separate service on your device.

Check out my channel – there are loads more iPhone Quick Tips waiting for you there.