Apple Just Removed the Option to Use Portrait and Night Modes at the Same Time

What a beautiful night. You know what you need? A new headshot. It’ll look great on your LinkedIn/Insta/Hinge or whatever. But first, a choice. Do you want to look shadowy and indistinct, or do you want to have to compete with a background that’s totally in focus and distracting?

Hey, we’re not saying you don’t already look like a million bucks. But if it’s dark out and your spontaneous photographer has an iPhone 17 Pro, you may just end up looking like 500,000 bucks, which isn’t half bad, but that’s what you get now that Apple has removed the ability to shoot in both portrait and night modes at the same time in the iPhone 17 Pro.

No word from Apple… Yet.

You can still snap photos on night mode in the iPhone 17 Pro when you’re not also in portrait mode, and you can still snap pictures in portrait mode as long as you don’t need the iPhone to boost its low-light performance with night mode. It’s just that you’re no longer able to do both at the same time.

It was users on Reddit and the official Apple forum who noticed their inability to select both modes at the same time, a capability that already existed for the iPhone Pro, all the way from the iPhone 12 Pro through 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro.

Apple quietly removed the feature. So quietly, in fact, that even though the iPhone 17 series went on sale in September 2025, it took more than two months for word to spread widely across the internet.

That may just be a reflection that not all that many people are taking portrait shots of people in the dark. But it’s also curious that Apple hasn’t said why it removed the ability to use the two together.

Perhaps it’ll be added back as a feature in a future iOS update, since the two modes still exist in the phone’s camera. Only Apple knows, and it’s not saying.