How to quickly adjust the brightness of the flashlight on your iPhone, iPad Pro or iPod touch

That LED flash on your iPhone doubles as a flashlight with adjustable brightness. If you use your iPhone flashlight often, you might want to learn a new trick that will let you quickly turn on your device’s flashlight and adjust its brightness in one uninterrupted motion.

How to adjust iPhone flashlight brightness

Many Apple customers, especially novice users, typically use the following three-step process to turn on their iPhone’s flashlight and adjust its intensity to suit their needs.

  1. Open the Control Center on your iPhone.
  2. Touch the Flashlight icon in the Control Center to turn the feature on.
  3. Touch and hold the Flashlight icon until the slider appears, then move it up or down.

Doing so will increase or decrease the flashlight brightness.

A photograph accompanying the iPhone flashlight brightness tutorial featuring a closeup of a matte black iPhone 7 Plus showing the rear dual-lens camera and LED flash detail

Instead of that three-step process, according to a support document on the Apple website, you can both turn on the flashlight and adjust its brightness in one continuous motion.

  1. Open the Control Center on your iPhone.
  2. Touch and hold the Flashlight icon, then drag the brightness slider up or down

And that’s how you quickly adjust the brightness of your iPhone’s flashlight!

You can also use your Apple Watch as a flashlight, as explained in our separate tutorial.

3 ways to turn on your device’s flashlight

As of iOS 12, customers can turn the iPhone flashlight on or off with the Siri voice assistant.

  • “Hey Siri, turn on my flashlight.”
  • “Hey Siri, will you turn on my flashlight?”
  • “Hey Siri, turn off my flashlight.”

However, Siri cannot be used to adjust the flashlight brightness. Don’t even bother using very specific voice commands like “Hey Siri, set the flashlight brightness to fifty percent” because doing so will change your screen brightness instead of adjusting the intensity of your flashlight.

Aside from Siri and Control Center, you can also access the flashlight on your iPhone, iPad Pro or iPod touch by pressing hard the Flashlight icon on the Lock screen on iPhone models that support the 3D Touch feature (touch and hold the icon on non-3D Touch iPhones).

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Unfortunately, however, the Lock screen icon is a simple toggle that cannot be held pressed to reveal the brightness slider. So, even if you turn on the flashlight by tapping its icon on the Lock screen, you still need to access the Control Center to adjust its intensity.

Aside from illuminating low-light scenes captured with your iOS device’s camera and doubling as a flashlight, the LED light located on the rear side of your iOS device can even be configured to blink whenever you receive a new message or incoming call.

Image credit: Xavier Wendling / Unsplash