Invites is a brand-new app from Apple that lets you quickly and easily create invitations for parties, events, and general get-togethers. While there are already plenty of apps that do similar things, Invites shines because it integrates so closely with other parts of your iPhone. For instance, attendees can easily drop photos into a shared event album or add their favourite tunes to the party playlist in Apple Music.

In this short series of videos, I’ll guide you through everything from setting up your first event to inviting guests and using those cool collaboration features I just talked about. So, let’s jump straight in and get started!

If you don’t already have the Apple Invites app, you’ll want to download it for free from the App Store. Now, whilst the app itself is free to use, creating invitations does require an iCloud+ subscription. So, anyone who pays for extra iCloud storage can create invites, but everyone else can still view and RSVP to invitations—they just can’t create their own.

When you open the app, you’ll see a rather empty screen just like this. Later on, of course, you’ll be able to tap “Upcoming” in the top corner to filter events, but right now, we don’t have anything there at all. So, let’s tap the big “Create Event” button in the middle and get started!

Straight away, you’ll see this colourful invitation template, and the first thing I’m going to do is give my event a name. I’m inviting some friends around for a relaxed games night, so it makes sense just to name it “Games Night”.

Next, I can customise how my invitation looks, and the easiest way to do that is by tapping “Add Background”. Here, I can either: Use built-in images, including emoji wallpapers and photographic themes, Select my own photo from my iPhone’s library. Or if I have a device that supports Apple Intelligence, I’ll also see an option for Image Playground, which generates an image automatically.

I’ll tap into Image Playground, and you’ll see that it takes the event name as a starting point for image generation. I want to set the vibe for the event, so I’m going to add some extra words to my prompt—“cozy” and “board games on a table”. Now, I can swipe through the generated images and pick the one I like best. This one is perfect, so I’ll tap “Done” and go back to adding event details.

You’ll notice that the whole invitation has now changed colour to match the image, which looks really nice.

Now, I’m going to specify the date and time of my Games Night. Using the on-screen controls, I can: pick an exact date and time, or create an all-day event, with the option to include an end time if I want to.

Once I press “Done”, those details are added to my invitation.

Next, I want to add a location. Since this event is actually at my home, I don’t want to share that address on YouTube, so instead, I’ll search for a landmark here in Cornwall—let’s go with The Eden Project.

What’s nice here is that once you’ve chosen a location, you can enter a custom name for it, which is really handy if you want to specify a room or meeting point within a larger venue. So, I’ll rename my location to “The Games Room”.

Now that I’ve added the date and location, my invitation now includes the weather forecast as well as a map of where the event will be held. You can tap on either of these to open the Weather and Maps apps, respectively.

I’m going to leave the Photos and Music options off for now, but we’ll come back to them in a later video in the playlist.

Finally, I can press “Preview” in the top corner to see what my guests will receive. I think this looks great, so it’s time to start inviting people.

Head over to the next video in this playlist to learn about the different ways to invite guests, and I’ll see you there shortly!