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It’s a puzzle. Night mode isn’t available in portrait mode on the iPhone 17 Pro, and no one seems to know why. yet.
Night mode automatically brightens photos and captures more details, even in low-light conditions. You can set the exposure time manually. In portrait mode, the camera focuses sharply on the subject you are capturing and blurs the background, creating a depth-of-field effect.
The first clue that Portrait mode’s night mode was disappearing came from one person Apple support document Titled Take Night Mode Photos Using Your iPhone Camera. It states what many iPhone fans already know: “Night mode automatically brightens photos and captures more detail in low light.”
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The iPhone 17 Pro’s Night Mode is listed in two separate parts of the online iPhone User Guide (here And also here) For taking selfies and time-lapse photos. But it is not included in Directory listing To take night mode photos in portrait mode. The feature is still available on iPhone Pro and Pro Max in the 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 series.
After investigating, CNET staff verified that Night Mode is indeed no longer an option in Portrait Mode with the iPhone 17 Pro.
An Apple representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When the iPhone 17 Pro launched in September, Andrew Lanxon, CNET’s lead photographer in Europe, said, Impressed With camera upgrades on iPhone 16 Pro, including optical zoom doubled to 8x, a telephoto camera sensor that is 56% larger than before and a 48-megapixel resolution.
Lankson, a professional photographer and YouTuber, was excited Get shooting with iPhone 17 Pro. But apparently, he will have to do without night mode in portrait mode.
Why did Apple do that?
Why was night mode removed? “There doesn’t seem to be a hardware reason for this,” said a senior writer at CNET. Jeff Carlson. “The lidar camera that helps with low-light focusing and depth perception is still there. Maybe it’s a software issue, but as of… Candidate for iOS 26.2“The feature does not exist.”
Carlson found it strange that it had taken three months since the launch of the new Pro model before people noticed it was missing. He speculates that the feature may have been removed because “it wasn’t being used and Apple could allocate other processing resources elsewhere,” he said. “Something may have occurred during development of the new operating system and revamped camera app, and this was not a high enough priority to fix in the regular release schedule.
“People have become accustomed to having iPhone models that allow for shots that are difficult for smartphone cameras to capture, especially on a flagship phone like the iPhone 17 Pro,” Carlson said. “I hope the feature returns to give everyone as much control over the photos they take.”
One similarity might be what Samsung did earlier this year — Remove the S Pen Bluetooth connection On the new S25 Ultra. Samsung said it removed this feature because not many people were using it. Is Apple doing the same thing with Night Mode for photos?
Some people miss it, others don’t
A subreddit about it It seems to be a combination of “who cares” and “oh darn”. Redditor kaoss_pad was “very glad” the feature was gone, saying “it often catches me by surprise and activates when I don’t want it to and ruins a moment.”
Some Redditors were not aware of this feature. CultofCedar posted, “Lol I didn’t even notice that wasn’t a thing,” and Successful-Cover5433 wrote, “I didn’t even know you could.”
A couple of people weren’t happy about the mysterious disappearance, including nsfdrag, who posted, “Kinda bummer, I like this feature.”