iPhone Selfie Tips for Blind Users: Avoiding the Chop!

Using camera is a nightmare. I even have difficulty to scan documents and setup FaceId at first setup.

For a spontaneous--not staged--picture, I take several individual pictures--not bursts--with slight angle differences and go through them in Seeing AI to ask various questions. The Camera app will give sound and spoken feedback on whether the phone is level. Seeing AI will rarely tell you if something is cut off by an edge, so you need to ask specific questions and use the Explore by touch through the Brows photos in the description tab of the app. If the subject is in the frame, but not quite where I want it, I crop the picture in the Photos app. Lots of practice aiming the camera helps too. And ya, it's a lot of work, but you can get that one great picture...
This is where the model of iPhone might make a difference. My SE3 only takes a wide angle shot, and all zooming and such is just digital auto cropping. In that situation, I turn the phone on its side with the power button on top sometimes, then crop the picture into a portrait orientation and the aspect framing I want from the landscape. Also, I use a remote camera button or clicker because pressing the volume button to take the picture, or tapping the screen sometimes moves the camera. I'll spare you the rambling on picking aspects for posting on social media, as well as, applying filters and depth of field etc.

I’m not sure exactly how it would work as far as selfies go but if I remember right, Seeing AI does have a section in there where you can use the back camera to take a picture and it guesses your age or something like that, but I remembered to sink leave it telling me if it with my face was in the center or left or right hope that helps

it used to be that to take a selfie as a VoiceOver user, all you had to do was have the camera app open, point the camera at your face, and voiceover would announce the position of your face in relation to the camera. When it would say 'face centered', you would snap your pic and voilà.
At some point Apple broke this. You can still try it, but it is no longer accurate. 😭

OK ya, Seeing AI, in the Describe tab where you can take a picture, does guide you for taking a selfie. Thanks, @Rixon Smith, for pointing that out. I have not checked to see how accurate it is. You can then save the picture and there is an album in the Photos app. It only guides you for faces--I don't have a dog or cat to test it on--tells you a distance estimate and I think it saves it in JPG format. Once it's in the Photos app you should be able to manipulate it, if it isn't up to professional composition standards, and you are obsessive about such things.
I tried to work with the Camera app's view finder in VO focus, but other than a general and very vague idea of what might possibley be in the frame, it is just a distraction. Nice feature though for just pointing the phone at things, and I am glad it's there. Do a single tap on the middle of the screen if the descriptions start lagging behind what is currently being seen by the camera.

Hi. So, Selfie X doesn't work with iOS 26. I've tried it with my iPhone SE 3rd generation, and when I lost that phone yesterday at an event, I got an iPhone 15. I tried it with the new phone as well, and it still doesn't work. If you rely on that app to take selfies for you, DO NOT UPGRADE TO 26!

I have struggles with the camera even just taking regular pictures. Cathy, I did the same thing as you. I went from an iPhone SE third generation to my iPhone 15. That’s a good phone. Turtle asked you for a long time. Too bad the app that you guys wanted doesn’t work on iOS 26 though. Hopefully the developers can update it to work with iOS 26.

When I’m in the Camera app with VoiceOver on and I want to take a selfie, VoiceOver tells me if my face is centered, to the left, to the right, and so on. I don’t take many selfies, but I just tested it and it works well.

If you have a sighted friend ask him or her how they possission their phone to take pictures. Ask them to show you by guiding your hands and arm how far from you. That might help that way you have an idea. Long live cats.

I've only used the front camera on my phone for Facetime calls, and all pictures have been with the wide-angle back camera on my SE3. That one takes a picture the size and shape of a sheet of printer paper at, I'm guessing, about eight inches away. I appologize for not giving metric measurements. Twelve inches is larger than a legal sized sheet of paper, going by my Scanner Bin. You want the lens to be lower than your eyes, but the distance away from your face determines how much lower. Take several face pictures moving up and down a little with the distance you feel comfortable holding the phone, ask an AI describer about them, and pick the one that puts your eyes above the center of the picture. You can even ask if it's a well ballenced or good looking picture, and sometimes get a reasonable answer. Just make sure you specifically ask if the edges cut off parts you don't want cut off because the AI is likely not to tell you. I'll explain, but it is a bit complicated.
I think most of the sited people are taking selfies with the front camera while looking at the screen display, then adjusting it for this or that social media posting or printout with cropping tools, and that's why it's very difficult to give an answer that would always work. A good, or natural feeling, face shot puts the eyes around the dividing line of the top and middle thirds of the picture. Other areas and angles can have an uncomfortable look to them, like if the face is at the bottom of the picture and there's a bunch of empty room above. Put your face down at the bottom and have the camera angled looking up, and it will make a good halloween picture of a crazy person. You can ask an AI describer if your eyes are near that upper-third dividing line. I ask Seeing AI to describe images in relation to a grid of thirds or its intersections about fifty times a day.
If you post the picture on Facebook directly from your camera without editing the size, Facebook will chop off parts of the picture to make it fit one of their standard frames, none of which are what the iPhone takes without adjustment. Most sites do fine if you put the picture into either a 4:5 or a square aspect frame, and you should be able to choose that in the camera app before taking pictures. The other aspect that works on sites is 9:16, a tall skinny picture or it's landscape version, 16:9, that is used a lot for video.
Hope that wasn't way too much.