Your iPhone’s Flashlight Can Go Dimmer Than You Think

While it is convenient to have a flashlight function available on your smartphone whenever you might need it, your iPhone’s flashlight—even at minimum brightness—can often be too bright, especially if you accidentally point it at someone. But there is a way to lower the flashlight’s brightness below that minimum level.

How to dim your iPhone flashlight below the minimum brightness

You probably already know 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 here. To go even lower, you’ll need to utilize a new feature in your iPhone’s Shortcuts app, as of iOS 17.

To start, open Shortcuts, go to the Shortcuts tab, and hit the + button in the top-right corner. Select Add Action, search for Set Flashlight (or Set Torch), and select it. You’ll now see a trigger called Turn Flashlight On (or Turn Torch On).

Tap the word Turn and select Toggle from the drop-down menu. Next, hit the right-arrow icon next to flashlight or torch, and you’ll see a Brightness slider. Drag it all the way to the left to reduce torch brightness to the minimum possible level. Tap Done to save the shortcut. If you want to skip the hassle of creating your own shortcut, you can download the one I created.

For some reason, the brightness slider for this shortcut goes dimmer than the one in Control Center. So, any time you need just a little bit of light to guide your way, activate this shortcut instead.

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

If you want to access it without unlocking your iPhone, there are two ways to do so. First, you can map it to your iPhone 15 Pro’s Action Button. If you already have something else mapped, try this hack to use two shortcuts with the Action Button. For those with other iPhones, the flashlight can easily be mapped to the Back Tap gesture.