This viral iPhone 12 wedding dress pic creeped out the internet

Ah, the perils of accidentally taking an iPhone photo in the wrong mode.

Over the weekend, an Instagram post from user Tessa Coates (@wheatpraylove) caught some traction online because, for lack of better phrasing, it made her iPhone 12 camera seem like it was going haywire.

Reflection inside iPhone 12 picture baffled the internet

In the photo, Coates is in a wedding dress standing in front of two mirrors, but both are reflecting entirely different poses from the one she’s actually striking. It’s bizarre.

Of course, as TechRadar noted, this sent internet sleuths into a frenzy to figure out how the heck that could happen. One theory was that the iPhone’s photographic software simply couldn’t deal with mirrors. That would be funny, but as YouTuber iPhonedo pointed out, that’s not actually the case.

Put simply, despite the initial Instagram caption insisting the photo wasn’t shot in panorama mode, it was, indeed, shot in panorama mode. The image’s resolution and aspect ratios aren’t correct for the default iPhone photo settings. Beyond that, it turns out there’s a little quirk that causes the panorama symbol to not appear on panoramic photos if you don’t finish the horizontal sweep.

Do that, and you may get a photo that doesn’t look panoramic, but stitches together multiple shots (and thus, multiple posts) in a more normal-looking aspect ratio. That, it appears, is how you end up with three different poses in one photo.

Go ahead and play with this bug now before Apple inevitably fixes it.