10 tweaks to make iOS 17 awesome

There are a lot of awesome features in iOS 17 — Contact Posters, StandBy, Safari profiles, shared passwords and much, much more. Here’s a simple to-do list on how to make the most of Cupertino’s latest and greatest iPhone operating system.

10 things to tweak after upgrading to iOS 17

You can see all these in action in this video:

Table of contents:

1. Set up your Contact Poster
2. Configure StandBy
3. Name pets in Photos
4. Make a grocery list
5. Set up shared passwords
6. Share your AirTags
7. Create a separate Safari profile
8. Edit Apple Watch widgets
9. Log your mental health
10. Make stickers from photos

1. Set up your Contact Poster

Contact Posters are a beautiful way to customize how you show up when you call someone on the phone or share your contact information. Here’s a detailed guide on how to set up a Contact Poster in iOS 17.

You can get started in the Contacts app, the Phone app or in Settings.

The Photo posters work best if you have a great Portrait mode photo of yourself. You’ll want to center yourself just under your name — you can do that by sliding the image around with two fingers. You can pick some color effects or hide the background. You also can tweak the font to match a particular aesthetic you prefer.

Tap Done to edit your corresponding contact photo — you can choose a different one or simply recrop the original picture. Once you get started, you’ll see that you can create multiple Contact Posters. Each one pairs with an ordinary contact photo.

You also can make a Contact Poster out of a Memoji, Apple’s cartoon avatar version of you. (Here’s how to create a great Memoji.) You can use one you’ve created of yourself or pick one of the other emojis, choosing from a variety of poses, some of which are floating heads and some of which are full upper bodies. You can pick a background color and font.

The Monogram option for Contact Posters is pretty simple. You just enter your initials, change the font, and pick a color. I think it’s kind of ugly, but you do you.

2. Configure StandBy

A special mode in iOS 17 called StandBy turns your iPhone into a smart display with big, easy-to-see controls and information, like the weather forecast. StandBy comes on any time your phone is charging and held horizontally.

You can use StandBy when your iPhone is on your desk, playing music in the kitchen or charging on your nightstand. One of the best things is the ability to set up different StandBy modes for different rooms. The system automatically remembers locations, so you can have your iPhone turn into a digital picture frame in the living room, or a music controller in the kitchen.

You can use it as a digital picture frame or use one of many different designs of fullscreen clocks.

Tap a Live Activity to see music playing or running timers when you’re in the kitchen.

You also can set up a view with two widgets side by side. Just like on the Home Screen, each widget is a stack that you can scroll through. Add or remove widgets to customize it.

3. Name pets in Photos

The Photos app has offered people detection for a long time, but now you can name dogs and cats, too. This makes it incredibly easy to collect all the pictures of each pet in one place.

Just open the Photos app, go to the People & Pets album, tap on your furry friend(s) and enter their name(s).

You can tap Review Photos to double-check its work. (It might get two similar-looking dogs or cats mixed up.) You also can long-press on any picture and tap This is not [pet name] to remove any false positives.

If you run into certain problems — like the app confuses one dog for another one that lives in a completely different city, or it mistakenly identifies two dogs that lived years apart — you can take advantage of Photos’ smart search features. For instance, searching for “Scout, Sandusky” lets me find all the pictures where it mistakes my dog Scout for a similar-looking dog I know.

4. Make a grocery list

I, like many others, use Reminders as a grocery list. I also recommend sharing a list with someone else in your household so everyone can see what needs picking up when someone’s at the store.

New in iOS 17, you can mark a Reminders list as a grocery list. That will automatically sort ingredients into the most common store categories like produce, meat, bakery, frozen foods, household items, pet care, etc. This can make your list easier to parse when at the store.

If the app gets something wrong on a list, tap on the ⓘ and tap Section to move an item to a different category. It’ll learn over time.

5. Set up shared passwords

Now, sharing passwords with people outside your family is explicitly against the rules of most streaming services. But if you were, hypothetically, to buy someone a streaming service for their exclusive use, you would need to give them their password.

A new feature in iOS 17 makes sharing passwords easy. From Settings > Passwords, tap + and create a New Shared Group. Give it a name, add people and create your group.

Then, you can select passwords that you’ll move into the group. They’ll sync across everyone’s devices. This works with Passkeys, too — a new system that logs you in with Face ID or Touch ID with no password at all.

6. Share your AirTags

If you have some AirTags in your family, you definitely want to share them with other people. This saves them from the incessant warnings that they’re being stalked because they borrowed your keys or your wallet.

From the Find My app, tap Items, tap on any item, then hit Add Person to send an invitation.

7. Create a separate Safari profile

If you use Safari for school or work, you probably have a separate Google account that you use for those — and you probably get annoyed at Google signing you out of your accounts all the time. You also probably have a separate group of passwords that you only need to use in certain settings — like school or work.

Creating a new Safari profile is a great way to keep everything separate. To do that, go to Settings > Safari and tap New Profile. Give it a name, icon and color.

Then, when you open Safari, you can switch profiles from the tab overview page. Each profile, as you can see, can have its own set of tab groups, bookmarks, passwords and extensions.

8. Edit Apple Watch widgets

A new feature of the Apple Watch is a smart stack of widgets that lives right below the watch face. You can simply scroll up with your finger, or by spinning the Digital Crown, to quickly see some vital information or launch an app.

You can control what information the widgets surface. To edit your Apple Watch widgets, tap and hold on the watch screen. I removed the News and Activity widgets that are there by default, and added Music, Podcasts and Timer. You can even edit the app shortcuts at the bottom of the list to easily launch your favorite apps.

9. Log your mental health

iOS 17 adds a new mood-tracking feature to the Health app. By tracking your moods and emotions, you might be able to identify what helps or hinders your mindset.

To utilize it, open the Health app and find the panel that says “Logging Your Emotions and Moods.” Tap Get Started.

You can log how you feel at any particular moment or your overall feelings about the day. There’s a slider where you can identify how good or bad you’re doing. You’re also prompted to identify what’s making you feel that way — health, fitness, friends, work, family, etc.

You can turn on reminders so you don’t forget to log your emotions each day.

Looking at the data, you can see how your feelings line up with other factors like how much sleep you get, how much time you spend exercising or outside, etc. If you take more time doing this than I have, you might see some correlations build up over time that you can take action on.

10. Make stickers from photos

In iOS 17, you can select anything in a picture — a person, a cat, a stapler, a car — and turn it into a sticker that you can use in iMessage, Snapchat, Notes and more.

Just tap and hold on the subject of a picture and tap Add Sticker. You can find your stickers from the emoji keyboard in any app.

You can tap and hold on a sticker to add effects — a white outline like a paper sticker, or a shiny, bubbly effect like a puffy sticker. It’s a lot of fun in group chats.

There are 40 more iOS 17 features to learn about

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getting all you can out of the new features in iOS 17. If you want to know everything, see our master list of the 50 best iOS 17 features here.