After a year of waiting, Apple finally rolled out iOS 18 to the public in September, the latest version of iPhone software. This update introduces eye-catching features like customizable home screens. As often happens, there are also some eye-roll-worthy changes. For me, that includes the new Photos app.
Apple announced the new Photos app during its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, touting it as “the biggest-ever redesign.” When you first open the app on iOS 18, the changes are very apparent.
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Most notably, Apple added new collections, like Recent Days, People and Pets, and Trips, to sort your Photos. The company also modified the Photos app to work seamlessly with Apple Intelligence, which will be available on all iPhone 16 models and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max starting with the launch of iOS 18.1.
However, what Apple refers to as a “simplified layout” seems unnecessarily complicated for many using the Photos app. The previous tab design was replaced by collections automatically categorized by themes. It makes finding the popular Recently Saved photos difficult and doesn’t show all the photos on your device like it once did with an All Photos tab.
Am I too accustomed to the old Photos app, or is this change wrong for Apple? The biggest problem with the new Photos app may be that it takes some time to get used to it.
The old Photos app already had some categories and themes, but the iOS 18 version has all the photos on one page, condensing what used to be in tabs into one scrollable library. However, it provides a far less intuitive experience.
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I liked having all my photos in one place. I often download photos from OneDrive and WhatsApp so I can access them through the All Photos tab. Now, these downloaded images are only in the Recently Saved collection, so I must dig out the folder to find them.
Images from Messages are also saved in the Recently Saved collection/album if they’re from an Android device. If it’s from iMessage, they’re saved in the Recently Saved and Photos section, making things very confusing when exchanging files between different users.
I’m not alone in my frustrations, as iPhone users on Reddit have voiced their displeasure with the iOS 18 Photos app. ZDNET’s Jason Hiner shares a similar sentiment.
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“Think about those times when you were scrolling through your library, and a photo caught your eye, reminding you of something similar in an album,” one Reddit user commented. “Before, you could just flick to the ‘Albums’ tab, find what you needed, and flip right back to where you were in the library. Easy, right? Now, if you make that switch, your place in the library is lost, and you have to scroll up again in the library to find where you were previously.”
Aside from the inferior Photos app navigation, videos in the Photos app no longer appear on full screen when you select them. Instead, tapping a video gives you a smaller view of it, and then you have to tap it again to open in full screen and then again to unmute the automatic playback. The video preview also doesn’t show timestamps anymore, so if you want to crop at a certain time or second, you simply can’t. At least the time code comes up when you scrub through the video.
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“The UX is a huge downgrade. It’s so bad that I had to submit feedback to Apple via the feedback app in the beta. Never did one of those when it wasn’t a technical bug, just pure user experience frustration,” another Redditor said.
How to navigate the iOS 18 Photos app
If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll likely miss the camera roll section, which has existed for about as long as the iPhone has. Instead of seeing tabs for all photos, camera roll, albums, etc., the iOS 18 Photos app shows all the pictures you’ve taken at the top of the screen; then you have to scroll down to find a “Recents” category with the photos you’ve taken in the past few days, sorted by day.
Keep scrolling to find People & Pets, where you can see and modify photos sorted by what the phone thinks are the same people (It mostly gets the recognition part right, so I must commend Apple for that). Memories are still available within the Photos app, followed by Trips and Featured Photos. Scrolling down, you’ll find Media Types and Utilities, then Albums.
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Apple is clearly trying to offer a more personalized experience with the new Photos app, but it probably wasn’t necessary. The stacks of pictures at the top of the screen make the Photos app look cluttered upon opening. It takes a lot of visual scanning to find a photo or an album, making the app less intuitive than ever.
“‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is most people’s take on this,” one commenter on Reddit remarked. “The Photos app was fine and worked perfectly. There was no need to make major changes like this.”
I hope a future version of iOS 18 will bring back the Camera Roll or at least tone down all the different categories, collections, memories, and albums I now must remember. It was already bad enough to move a photo to an album and not have the Photos app remove it from the Recents pile. All I wanted was for Apple to give us better photo editing features without the curtain of Apple Intelligence, not a more complicated way to find a picture from last week.
