I just got a new Apple Watch and am exploring how to set different watch faces. Pretty fun stuff! I’d like to have it show a dozen or so of my favorite portraits rather than a preset face, however. How can I set that up?
One of the most entertaining aspects of smartwatches is that they can serve as tiny photo displays. Every time you check the time, it’ll show a new photograph that will – hopefully! – delight you. This feature is true across just about every watch, but Apple’s done a particularly good job with its photo watch faces. Plural. There are two different styles of photo watch face for WatchOS with subtle differences. The most obvious: with portraits you can have the time partially occluded by the person’s head!
While you can set up some of this on the watch itself, it’s much easier to work with the Watch app on the paired iPhone. Much bigger screen and it’s where all your photos are stored anyway. Let’s jump in…
GET THEE TO THE FACE GALLERY
Tap on the Watch app to fire it up, then tap on “Face Gallery” along the bottom to see all of the options from Apple, including its latest:
Remember that each of these faces can further be customized with colors, tweaks to the sub-display items (known in the watch world as “complications”) and more. Lots to try out, including the fun Snoopy face. Scroll down until you see both Photos and Portrait:
Since I’ve previous set up the Photos face, it shows one of my own photos in the preview thumbnail, whereas the Portraits display is one of Apple’s models. Notice in the Portraits preview, however, that the woman’s head slightly covers a portion of the time. That’s the big difference between Portraits and Photos.
OPTION ONE: A PHOTOS WATCH FACE
Tap on the “Photos” preview to check out how that’s set up. It’s easy.
Note the description: “A new photo appears every time you raise your wrist or tap the display. You can see photos from an album, Memory, or your library. You can also customize your photos with different colors.”
The color’s a bit weird but the idea is that it’s going to be used as a filter to remove other colors. Pick grey and everything will look like it’s black & white. Choose red and every image will have a red tinge. If you prefer the original colors, choose the “/” option as I have in the above.
You can pick a favorite album or set of photos but I prefer to let the Apple algorithms do the work by choosing “Dynamic”:
Again, repeating Apple’s note: “Dynamic displays photos from your recent Memories and updates when you have new ones.” In other words, trust WatchOS to do the right thing and add new pics as appropriate.
Ready to try it out? Tap on “ADD” just to the right of the preview image.
OPTION TWO: PORTRAITS WATCH FACE
The other possibility is to choose “Portraits”, which takes you to a very similar configuration screen:
Notice that, again, the person’s head is “in front” of the time. Magic.
The text description is: “This face highlights the people, pets, and other subjects of your photos each time you raise your wrist. You can choose from 3 different type styles for the time. You can also choose whether to layer the time in front of or behind the subject.”
This time you’ll want to manually choose the photos to use, which is easily done and, if you’re like me, a fun trip down memory lane. Once done, you’ll again have the “ADD” button available:
A tap on “ADD” and it moves me to the My Watch area, with the new face shown along with any others I’ve already selected and downloaded to the watch:
You can select it by tapping or on the watch itself (tap and hold, then swipe to change face). You can also go back to the Portraits Face Gallery area and tweak things…
A tap on “Set as current Watch Face” and your rotating carousel of portrait images will be loaded and ready to access. The first time I look at my wrist, I see this:
Nice, but no layering. I tweaked the settings to use that blue color overlay and the second time I check the time…
This time you can see the layering effect. Very cool!
Pro Tip: I have quite a few Apple Watch tutorials here on my site too. Please check out my Apple Watch Help for lots of useful content in this regard!