An image pickup apparatus having not less than three optical systems, and an image pickup element which picks up an object image by the optical system, includes an object-information acquiring section which acquires information of an object, a parallax-amount computing section which computes an amount of parallax corresponding to the information of the object, and an optical-system selecting section which selects optical systems for photographing from among not less than three optical systems, based on the amount of parallax corresponding to the information of the object, that has been computed by the parallax-amount computing section.