Smartphone camera lenses: how to choose one and which one to buy?

Want to go a little further with smartphone photography? It’s pretty simple: add a lens. These days, you don’t need to be an expert photographer to take nice pictures. I tried it myself! So, I put my more sophisticated camera aside and started taking pictures with my phone. Who would have thought? Anything can happen! In this article, I’ll explain how smartphone camera lenses work and how to choose one. Let me reassure you right away: we’re talking about what I still consider “gadgets,” but they can genuinely be useful if you want to have fun and take better photos with your phone.

Smartphones have changed a lot of habits, and photography is no exception! Today, almost everyone has a smartphone, and not just for making calls. Most people use it as a camera: landscapes, selfies, romantic dinners, evenings with friends… Any excuse is good enough to capture a moment with your phone. So, naturally, manufacturers have developed accessories for smartphone photography. But let’s be honest: even though image quality keeps improving on newer phones, the result is not always great, depending on what you want to shoot. That’s where smartphone lenses can help, at least to a certain extent.

So, what exactly is a smartphone camera lens? It’s an accessory that lets you change the focal length of your phone’s built-in lens. In other words, it allows you to photograph subjects closer up or farther away than you normally could with your phone alone. Smartphone lenses were originally designed mainly for macro photography, because digital zoom on phones quickly produced pixelated, poor-quality images. Since then, telephoto lenses and other types of smartphone lenses have also flooded the mobile accessory market.

Smartphone lenses have several advantages:

• ease of use: you’re not a professional photographer? No problem. These accessories are very easy to use and install. Whether they clip on or attach another way, you can fix them to your phone in no time and start using them seconds later;
• easy to carry: you don’t want to haul around photography gear? No worries. They’re light, small, and take up very little space. You can easily slip them into a pocket of your hiking bag and walk around without adding any real weight to your back;
• sturdiness: after testing them in plenty of situations, I can say that smartphone accessories are not especially fragile. They can handle bumps and scratches, within reason, of course. Their metal structure gives them a surprisingly sturdy feel, making them good little adventure companions;
• practicality: that’s the least we can ask of them, and they do the job well! Most are sold as kits, so you can take macro, wide-angle, fisheye, or optical zoom photos depending on what you want to shoot and the result you’re looking for;
• compatibility: this is another big strength of smartphone lenses. Whether you have an iPhone, a Samsung, or another phone, you can usually adapt these lenses to it.

This question is essential. You won’t use the same lens to photograph tiny details in forest moss as you would to capture your trip to New York. Each type of shot has its own type of lens! And for that, you need to understand the main characteristics of each lens. I’ll go through them below. After that, you’ll know everything about smartphone lenses, well, almost everything, and you’ll have no excuse for missing great photos!

As I mentioned earlier, a smartphone lens is usually quite light. The exact weight varies depending on the brand and type of lens, but it is often around 30 g, far lighter than your phone. Personally, I prefer lenses that stay light while still performing well. I’ll come back to my top 5 a little later. In any case, they are all easy to handle.

Sizes also vary from one brand to another. As with weight, though, I think the first thing to look at is the quality of the lens itself.

Many accessories are included when lenses are sold as a kit: clips, a carrying case, a cleaning cloth, and so on. I’ll talk more about these below. This can be an important factor when choosing what to buy, even if, let’s be honest, we’re not talking about a huge investment here.

A quick word about brands: there are now dozens of manufacturers making smartphone lenses, from simple macro accessories to more serious wide-angle and telephoto options. Some brands focus on affordable clip-on kits, while others, like Moment, aim for a more premium and durable system. In my opinion, the most important thing is not the brand name alone, but the type of lens, the mounting system, the optical quality, and whether it really matches the photos you want to take.

Now we come to the “technical” part, and probably the most important one if you want to avoid mistakes when buying and using your lenses.

You will find four main families of smartphone lenses:

• wide angle: want to photograph a beautiful landscape in French Polynesia, but your phone’s field of view feels too narrow? In that case, a wide-angle lens is the right option. It widens the angle of view while keeping the proportions of your photo and fitting more elements into the frame. The result is generally realistic, although, depending on the lens, lines and shapes may be distorted. This tool is also very useful in places where you can’t step back, for example when photographing a building in a narrow street, a concert, a museum, and so on;

• macro: this is the essential accessory for nature lovers and anyone who wants to capture the tiny details that make nature so beautiful. Have you ever looked at an object through a magnifying glass? A macro lens works in much the same way. Just be careful: you’ll need to place your phone very close to the subject to get the best result, because the focusing distance is much shorter with this type of lens;

• the telephoto/zoom lens: although smartphone zooms are becoming more and more sophisticated, distant details can still look poor, soft, or blurry. A smartphone telephoto lens helps you preserve better image definition. It is ideal for taking nice photos of distant subjects;

• the fisheye: if you want original, artistic photos with a strong visual effect, then a fisheye lens is what you need! It has a very short focal length and an ultra-wide angle of view. The frame contains lots of elements, and the edges are distorted. This creates a spherical look: everything close to the lens appears exaggeratedly large, while everything farther away appears small.

I would say it depends partly on the accessories you already own, and especially on the type of photos you want to take. It all comes back to the same question: what are you going to shoot? If you love wildlife photography and swear by safaris, then a smartphone telephoto lens may be useful, but not necessarily a macro lens. So, before buying your lenses, I recommend thinking carefully about how you plan to use them. Kits usually include three or four lenses and often come with a pouch or carrying case. If you’re new to smartphone photography, you’ll also find packs with extra accessories such as a mini tripod, a remote control for triggering your phone from a distance, a selfie stick, and more. The advantage of these kits is that you can get fully equipped and try all the accessories that might be useful to you. And if there are some you won’t use right away, just keep them. You never know, they may come in handy one day. At least you’ll already have them!

After going through the features and benefits of the different smartphone lenses, here are five current options that cover very different needs: wide angle, macro, and telephoto photography.

The Moment 18mm Wide Lens is probably one of the most serious smartphone lenses in this selection. Instead of going for a cheap clip-on gadget, Moment offers a more premium lens designed for users who want better image quality and a wider field of view. It is especially useful for travel, landscapes, city scenes, interiors, or simply when you want to fit more into the frame without relying only on your phone’s built-in ultra-wide lens.

Of course, this is not the cheapest option, and you’ll need to make sure it works properly with your phone and mounting system before buying. But if you want a more reliable, better-built lens than most basic kits, this is clearly one of the most interesting choices. In my opinion, it’s a good option if you often shoot with your smartphone and want something more serious than a simple accessory bought just for fun.

The MIAO LAB 28X HD Telephoto Lens is made for those times when your smartphone’s built-in zoom is simply not enough. With its strong magnification, it lets you photograph distant subjects while keeping more detail than with a basic digital zoom. It can be useful for travel, outdoor scenes, wildlife, concerts, sports, or simply for getting closer to a subject without physically moving.

That said, this type of lens requires a little patience. With this level of magnification, framing can be tricky, and you’ll get better results if your phone is stable. It’s not the kind of lens I would recommend for quick everyday shots, but for occasional long-distance photos, it can be really fun to use. If you like experimenting with your smartphone and want to go beyond classic wide-angle or macro lenses, this one makes sense.

This 10–20X zoom macro lens is designed for close-up photography. It lets you get very close to small subjects and capture details that your smartphone camera would usually struggle with. Flowers, leaves, insects, textures, jewelry, small objects, food details… this is exactly the kind of lens that can make smartphone photography more creative and more playful.

The built-in fill light is also a real plus, because macro photography often lacks light when you get very close to the subject. Of course, this is not a lens for landscapes or distant subjects: it is clearly made for close-up work. But if you enjoy photographing tiny details and textures, it’s probably one of the most interesting accessories in this updated selection.

The MIAO LAB 30X Telephoto Lens goes even further than a classic smartphone zoom lens. It is designed for long-distance photography and can also be used almost like a small monocular, depending on how you set it up. This makes it interesting for outdoor use, travel, hiking, wildlife observation, concerts, or sports, where you often want to get closer to the action without being physically near it.

As always with powerful telephoto lenses for smartphones, stability is essential. At 30X, the smallest movement can make framing difficult, so the included support system is important. I would recommend this kind of lens to users who already know they need reach, rather than to someone looking for a first simple smartphone lens. But for distant subjects, it offers much more creative potential than a basic phone zoom.

Note that these five smartphone lenses cover very different uses. Some are compact and easy to carry, while others are more specialized and require a more stable setup, especially the telephoto models.

Choosing a smartphone lens should feel much clearer now! So, if you want to take better pictures with your smartphone, you can have fun experimenting with macro, wide-angle, fisheye, telephoto, and other lenses. And for the purists who don’t want to take pictures with a smartphone but also don’t want to carry a heavy camera, you should take a look at compact cameras. I wrote a complete article on the subject, by the way!

And let me reassure anyone who came here out of curiosity: I’m not about to start taking pictures with my smartphone every day. I love my Canon 6D, and there’s no way I’m giving up my DSLR for a phone, haha. Plus, I just bought a small second-hand lens, an 85 mm f/1.8, perfect for photographing my kids!

See you soon,

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

Despite our care, a mistake may have slipped into this article. If you find any, please don't hesitate to let us know so we can correct it as soon as possible and keep our information up-to-date!