OpenAI has added a shortcut that surfaces your four most recent photos when you long press the plus button in ChatGPT on iPhone. It lands while Apple’s own camera and visual assistant features stay unavailable on iPhone in the EU.

OpenAI has taken two taps out of the most common thing people do with ChatGPT on a phone. Long pressing the plus button beside the prompt box now surfaces your four most recent photos, ready to attach.

The old path was not hard, just longer. Open the plus menu, choose Photos, then find the image in a library that may hold tens of thousands.

OpenAI’s consumer product lead Adam Fry called it “a fun, power user feature,” shipping it in the company’s 21 August weekly drop alongside better handling of the current time and faster loading for long conversations on the web.

Taken alone this is a gadget-blog item. What makes it worth a look is the gap it is quietly filling.

Apple demonstrated this exact job at WWDC26. A Siri mode in the Camera app and an expanded Visual Intelligence were meant to let you point a phone at something and ask about it, without attaching anything.

European iPhone owners are not getting those. Apple said in June that there is no timeline for Siri AI on iPhone or iPad in the EU, while keeping the features on Mac and Vision Pro.

The company was blunt about it. “We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” said software chief Craig Federighi.

The dispute is over the Digital Markets Act. Apple argues the Commission’s reading of the interoperability rules would force it to give rival assistants the same deep system access Siri has, and regulators rejected both its Trusted System Agent proposal and an 18-month phased rollout.

The practical result is a continent of iPhones without a native visual assistant. TNW has put the population affected at around 450 million people across the EU.

OpenAI is building for exactly that opening. It is pushing further into the same market on the commercial side too, taking ads into 31 European countries.

So a long press is a trivial feature almost everywhere. In Europe it is the closest thing an iPhone owner has to a camera that answers questions.

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