Deep Fusion or Not?

iOS 13.2 introduced exciting new camera feature, Deep Fusion, and I’ve been enjoying enhanced details — mostly in the photos of my dog. So far, you have kind of control to turn on or off Deep Fusion with Capture Outside the Frame setting, but there’s no way to tell a photo is deeply fused or not by Photos app’s display alone. Well, confusion is over.

Metapho 3.4.2 indicates Deep Fusion and Night Mode under the Image Information section. How?

For Deep Fusion, it’s flash EXIF metadata field. Ever since iPhone 4 introduced that tiny camera flash, normal photo taken with back camera without flash firing has integer value 16 in the field. A deeply fused photo has 32 — means no flash function, so Metahpo can read this field and compare iPhone model number to determine it’s Deep Fusion or not. I hope that Deep Fusion writes 32 to the flash field, is well intended thing and remains consistent.

Night Mode is more straightforward. It has couple of dedicated EXIF tags indicating the number of composite image used, and min/max/sum of multiple exposure times. Since a single Shutter Speed time loses its meaning for Night Mode’s compositing of multiple images, I’ve replaced Shutter Speed field under the Camera Information section for these fields.

And there’s Capture Outside the Frame. Additional images with wider field of view are well hidden to the third party app before a user makes edits explicitly in Photos. It is accessible by Metapho once the additional assets become permanent after cropping or straightening within Photos. Then you can find it in the list of assets.