Apple provides some pretty nice built-in Faces for the Apple Watch, but if you’re really looking to give the Apple Watch your own personal sense of style, you’ll be happy to know that watchOS 2 lets you select one of your own photos to use as an Apple Watch Face. You can choose to either use a single photo (including Live Photos if you’ve got an iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, or iPhone SE), or choose to cycle through your entire synced photo album.
To use a photo as a watch face, you’ll first need to ensure that you actually have some photos synced to your Apple Watch. If you haven’t done so already, open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, select “Photos” and choose “Synced Album” to select one of the albums from your Photos app on your iPhone. Pre-defined albums can be used for Favorites, All Photos, and Recently Added photos, or you can choose any album you’ve manually created in your photo library. A second option allows you to limit the number of photos on your Watch to 25, 100, 250, or 500, although keep in mind that this may still be subject to available space.
Once you’ve synced a photo album to your Apple Watch, you can then set up a photo face by pressing on the Apple Watch screen, scrolling past the existing watch faces, tapping “New” and then swiping or using the Digital Crown to scroll through the various watch face options until you see Photo Album or Photo. You can also quickly turn any photo you’re viewing in the Apple Watch Photos app into a watch face by pressing on the current photo and choosing the “Create Watch Face” option. Once you’ve created a photo watch face, you can also customize it to change the photo at any time, navigating by swiping, or using the Digital Crown, as you would in the watchOS Photos app; you can even create and save multiple photo watch faces in the event that you want to regularly switch between preset photos.
While a single photo will simply be displayed on the Apple Watch face all the time, the Photo Album watch face will automatically switch to a new photo each time you raise your wrist, and you can tap on the Apple Watch to cycle through the photos manually. Unfortunately, beyond your ability to choose the photo to be displayed, the Photo and Photo Album watch faces don’t yet offer any additional customization capabilities, so you’ll be stuck with the basic included time display, although watchOS tries to use black or white font colors as appropriate to keep the time visible.
