iPhone Photography Awards highlight stunning images shot on older models
Older iPhones kept winning at the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards, where a 2017 iPhone X shot took Gold and legacy models showed up across the winners.
The biggest surprise in the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards was how often older iPhones still carried the day. A volcano eruption photo on an iPhone 15 Pro won the Grand Prize, but the rest of the winners kept pulling the eye back to the same idea: great mobile photography is still about timing, framing, and restraint, not just the newest device.
The awards were announced on July 2, 2026, in the competition’s 19th year. IPPAWARDS says the contest has run since 2007 and drew thousands of entries from more than 140 countries, with work spread across 12 categories that include Abstract, Animals, Architecture, Children, City Life, Landscape, Nature, Portrait, and Series. The entry fee was $9.50, and the next deadline for the 20th annual competition is March 31, 2027.
Robyn Jensen took the Grand Prize with a volcano eruption image made on an iPhone 15 Pro in the Cayman Islands. Gold went to Gellért Gombai for a black-and-white photo shot on an iPhone X, a model Apple released in 2017. Silver was awarded for an iPhone 16 Pro image, and Bronze went to an iPhone 16 Pro Max, but the fuller winners list kept undercutting the idea that current flagship hardware is the only path to standout work. Older models visible among category winners and honorable mentions included the iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 6s, and iPhone 6 Plus.
The spread mattered because the contest rules still reward discipline over desktop polish. Images can be edited on-device with iOS apps, but not in desktop Photoshop, which keeps the process close to the phone and the moment of capture. CNET noted that only seven of the 40 winning photos in the main categories were made with the iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone 17 Pro Max, a detail that made the old-model showings harder to dismiss as nostalgia.
“When we started, people were still discovering what this device could do,” said IPPAWARDS founder Kenan Aktulun. That is still the point the 2026 results kept making, shot after shot: the phone in your pocket matters less than how deliberately you use it.
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