Your IPhone’s Flashlight May Be Dimmer Than You Think

While it’s convenient to have a flashlight feature on your smartphone for when you might need it, your iPhone’s flashlight —even at its lowest brightness —can often be too bright, especially if you accidentally point it at someone. But there is a way to reduce the brightness of the flashlight below this minimum level.

How to Reduce iPhone Flashlight Brightness Below Minimum Brightness

You probably already know that if you hold down the flashlight tile in Control Center, you can adjust the brightness of the light, but that’s not what I’m talking about. To go even lower, you’ll need to use a new feature in your iPhone’s Shortcuts app starting in iOS 17 .

To get started, open Shortcuts, go to the Shortcuts tab, and click the + button in the top right corner. Select “Add an action” , find “Install flashlight ” (or “Install flashlight “) and select it. You will now see a trigger called “Turn Flashlight On” (or “Turn Flashlight On”).

Click on the word “Rotate” and select “Toggle” from the drop-down menu. Then tap the right arrow icon next to the flashlight or flashlight and you’ll see a Brightness slider. Drag it all the way to the left to reduce the brightness of the flashlight to the lowest possible level. Click “Done” to save the shortcut. If you want to avoid the hassle of creating your own shortcut, you can download the one I created .

For some reason, the brightness slider for this shortcut is dimmer than in Control Center. So, whenever you need a little light to show the way, activate this shortcut instead.

To make things easier, add a new shortcut to your home screen. Tap and hold a shortcut in the Shortcuts app, select Share , then Add to Home Screen . It will appear as an app icon on your home screen, which you can tap to activate.

If you want to access it without unlocking your iPhone, there are two ways to do it. First, you can map it to your iPhone 15 Pro’s action button . If you already have something else mapped, try this trick to use two shortcuts for an action button . Those who have other iPhones can easily map the flashlight to the Back gesture .