Apple Intelligence can create Calendar events with just a single reference image — here's how to do it
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Apple Intelligence often gets a bad rap for not being as smart as other phones' AI feature sets or the big chatbot apps like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. But it's still capable of doing some clever things, like turning an image into a Calendar event for you.
Using either a screengrab or an image taken with Apple's Visual Intelligence feature, your iPhone can scan the text for relevant details and record it in Apple Calendar for you (sadly there isn't support for third-party calendars yet). You can edit the event if you like, but the feature will often need only a couple of taps to work most of the time.
If you want to try this yourself, I'll demonstrate the two methods of using Visual Intelligence to make Calendar events below. Just make sure you're running a Visual Intelligence-capable iPhone (an iPhone 16 or later), and bear in mind that these screenshots were taken on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26 — so things may look a little different if you're using a different model or older software!
How to use Visual Intelligence to create Calendar events on iPhone with a photo
1. Open up Visual Intelligence and frame up the event details
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
Visual Intelligence is most easily accessed with a long press of the Camera Control on the right edge of the iPhone. You can also open it with a button in Control Center or via the Action Button, provided you've set these up before hand. On an iPhone 16e, the Action Button and Control Center methods are the only methods you can use.
When the event is visible on screen, you can either press the shutter button to capture the image to then work from, or tap the Add to Calendar button to skip a step.
2. Tap Add to Calendar
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
Assuming you didn't press it in the previous step, you can use the Add to Calendar button from here, once you've made sure the necessary details are all in-frame.
3. Edit the details if needed
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
You get a basic preview of the event in the pop-up, but to check all the information, or add more, tap Edit on the right.
4. Create the event
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
Tapping Create Event on the previously shown screen, or the blue tick in the editing menu visible above confirms things. You can then visit the event in your calendar if you need to edit or double-check things later. The image you used to create the event, plus any other details that Visual Intelligence was able to extract, are attached at the bottom of the event.
How to use Visual Intelligence to create Calendar events on iPhone with a screenshot
1. Open up a webpage or other item you want to make an event from
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
In this instance, we have a Safari page showing the dates for next year's My Chemical Romance shows at London's Wembley Arena.
2. Take a screenshot, and tap Add to Calendar
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
Check our how-to on taking screenshots in iOS if you need more help with this, but the volume up and power buttons pressed together should do the trick.
By default, the menu shown above will now appear, with the Add to Calendar chip can be found at the bottom center of the screen. If you've set Full-Screen Previews to off, you will have to tap the mini screenshot preview in the corner of the screen to open this interface.
3. Edit or create the event
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
As with the previous method, the preview should now pop up, with the choice of editing or approving it.
4. Create the event, and check it in the Calendar
(Image: © Tom's Guide)
Rather than exiting the screenshot interface and opening Calendar manually, you can tap the green Added to Calendar pop-up to go straight there. As before, the captured image is stored with the event, as well as the URL it was taken from in this instance.
Still thirsty for more iPhone tricks? Check our iOS 26 features to try first guide to make sure you're fully up to speed with the latest iPhone software.
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