A puzzling bridal photo recently went viral, leaving many scratching their heads. In the image, comedian Tessa Coates poses in a wedding gown in front of two mirrors. Somehow, the photo captures her frozen in not just one, but three different poses at the same time. Coates insisted the photo wasn’t altered, which added an extra layer of intrigue. Just what exactly was going on here?

As the mind-boggling photo pinged around social media, speculation mounted over whether it involved glitched software, expert editing tricks, or even parallel universes colliding. But the mastermind behind the iPhone photography YouTube channel iPhonedo cracked the case wide open for us. As it turns out, the “three Tessas” image isn’t so mystifying after all.

The secret lies in the iPhone’s panoramic photo feature. Here’s an inside look at how it works.

Behind the Scenes: How iPhone Panoramic Photos Are Made

Apple’s pano shooting mode pieces together what’s essentially a wide-angle collage. When you sweep your phone from side to side, it rapidly snaps multiple photos, cropping and stitching parts together on the fly. The finished panorama has an elongated aspect ratio, revealing more of the scene than a standard photo could capture.

This automated stitching relies on finding similar areas across frames to blend the images together smoothly. But the process isn’t foolproof. Periodically, it glitches in silly or surreal ways. Ever notice weird artifacts like trailing limbs or disjointed faces in panos? That’s why.

The phone connects nearby parts of separate shots without realizing the whole picture. And that’s exactly what happened with Coates’ bridal “multiplier effect.”

How One Pano Frame Became Three Tessas

As tech YouTuber Faruk discovered, the original image metadata gave away its panoramic origins. The resolution was smaller than an iPhone 12’s standard photo size, matching that of a stitched pano crop. And with some testing, he reproduced the triple-pose phenomenon for himself.

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Here’s what likely took place. While framing up her shot, Coates set the camera to pano mode. She then turned side to side, timing her movements so that each mirror’s reflection captured her striking and holding a different stance. As her phone compiled the photos, it failed to recognize that the women across the frames were all her. So rather than lining them up, it simply spliced together pieces of each pose.

The result? One perfect storm of a pano glitch meets some creative choreography. And thus, the three-Tessa photo was born! While not actual photography magic, frozen moments cloned ad infinitum, it’s still an impressively executed illusion. Even if the secret’s out now, this viral shot fooled the internet, all thanks to the quirks of smartphone panoramas.