How to Make the iOS 18 Photos App Suck Less

[audiophilosophy]

I can’t understand how the photos app redesign got through so many stages of quality control and approval (I’m sure including Tim Cook). It’s definitely a downgrade from the previous app that worked just fine.
18.2 fixed it partially by returning to showing videos full screen instead of a smaller portion of the screen until you manually enlarged it.
One thing I really detest is that when you scroll up toward the top of an album, it exits you out of the album. This is a result making an album section vertical instead of horizontal (meaning back). But it’s so annoying because it’s really easy to accidentally trigger an exit from an album even when you’re actively trying not to. It goes against the swipe conventions we have grown used to from years of operating an iPhone.

 

[waxBy5-munfum-zettes]

I can’t understand how the photos app redesign go through so many stages of quality control and approval (I’m sure including Tim Cook). It’s definitely a downgrade from the previous app that worked just fine and I don’t think anyone was comparing about.
18.2 fixed it partially by returning to showing videos full screen instead of a smaller portion of the screen until you manually enlarged it.
One thing I really detest is that when you scroll up toward the top of an album, it exits you out of the album. This is a result making an album section vertical instead of horizontal (meaning back). But it’s so annoying because it’s really easy to accidentally trigger an exit from an album even when you’re actively trying not to. It goes against the swipe conventions we have grown used to from years of operating an iPhone.

 

[waxBy5-munfum-zettes]

Furthermore, the Slideshow has been completely ruined, you cannot chose your music anymore, nor the speed, or the layout - a total nightmare. In our family, probably the feature we have used the most. In addition the “features” are plain dumb, same goes for the AI. Hard to grasp that a great app, has been reduced to total garbage. We travel a lot, I have +120.000 items in the app. This days I try to avoid it and uses other apps as much as possible. I have been an Apple user since the mid 90ties, have a new Mac Studio fully specked, plus all the other Apple items. In addition to my frustration with the Photos app, I can add, non existent support, i.e. they are never able to solve your problems, bad quality control, cloud service a mess, etc, etc, etc. It’s more like some weird tik-tok, insta, FB mess!!!

 

[gank41]

How what happened?

Flops are always necessary part of success. But you have yet to prove the photos app is a flop.

There is no way to truly know if it’s a flop because there’s no competition to turn to, and then no analytical way to quantify that change from one default app to another. Because you can’t change the default Photos app.

 

[waxBy5-munfum-zettes]

in iOS 18 its a MEGA flop!

 

[audiophilosophy]

I'm still appalled by how bad Photos is now. Even the limited customization options don't make it much better. Still mad they broke my shortcut, too.

Using slidebox now as a replacement but it's less than ideal. Cest la vie.

Not sure what sidebox is, but what you said reminds me of what I have been doing for a while. Apple as gradually made the music app worse over the years, so I ended up finding another app, Cs Music (formerly called Cesium) which is basically a UI skin that works with the music library. It is so superior to the default music app. It’s a pity that Apple can’t sort out the basics sometimes. Cs Music is an app developed by one person and it is better than the app made by a multi-trillion dollar company with tons of employees.

 

[audiophilosophy]

See on Android, if you don't like the photo gallery app on your phone - just download a new one and set it as the default. Why can't we do that on iOS?

I don’t know about the photos app, but someone mentioned something called sidebox. There is an app that I use in place of the default music app. It’s called Cs Music and it’s basically an improved UX skin that operates the on-device music library. I wonder if sidebox or something else in the App Store has the same kind of vapidity but with the photos library. Pity we find ourselves wanting to see out alternatives in the first place though,

 

[spazzcat]

There is no way to truly know if it’s a flop because there’s no competition to turn to, and then no analytical way to quantify that change from one default app to another. Because you can’t change the default Photos app.

Even if there were other photo apps, people are not going to move their photos from app to app. You figure out if something works or not by getting feedback. Sometimes changes work and sometimes they fail.

 

[newyorksole]

two things I’ll never use. iCloud Photos and iCloud Music Library.

I just don’t trust Apple with these apps lol. I don’t wanna use iCloud Messages either. I’ll just manually sync and update my media.

 

[john123]

There is no way to truly know if it’s a flop because there’s no competition to turn to, and then no analytical way to quantify that change from one default app to another. Because you can’t change the default Photos app.

Since he quoted me using the word, I suppose I should clarify what I meant. I meant "flop" using its definition of "ungainly." To your point, yeah, you're stuck with it as the default, so speculation about commercial implications would be specious at best.

If we wanted to know about user opinions...well, I could get some actual numbers from a reputable market research company for a few thousand bucks. However, unless someone is itching to fire up their Venmo and go Christmas shopping for data, I doubt we're going to end up doing that here.

Edit: I guess I should add that people who are used to doing that kind of market research or user research (PMs) are pretty good at judging this stuff on the former. If we polled senior PMs, directors, and CPOs at the top 100 firms that with big SaaS products, I have a pretty damn good idea of how those results would come out.

What happens with middling PMs is they get too deep into their own crap and lose objectivity. They throw a bunch of boxes and text with ideas of functionality onto a Miro board, and they lose sight of the usability principle. It's incredibly common when you have bad senior PMs or PDs and/or unhelpful pressure from other parts of the business.

What I find interesting about this is that we've discuss ad nauseam on other things how Apple balances function and form. Usually that discussion has been about hardware. But as the OSes have because more bloated, I've noticed more and more discussion of it applied to Apple software. Much of it is in direct violation of the Jobs design principles. That's not necessarily a bad thing in all cases. But when you lose sight of them as one of your foundational guiding principles, bad design things happen.

 

[I7guy]

There is no way to truly know if it’s a flop because there’s no competition to turn to,

There is no way for us to know the feedback of ios 18 users. Apple may have more of the feedback - if customers bothered to report feedback to apple.

and then no analytical way to quantify that change from one default app to another. Because you can’t change the default Photos app.

You can send your feedback to Apple; post it online, take a survey I suppose etc. I like the app and hence have no additional feedback on it. That I like the changes, doesn't make the app perfect. I doubt anyone other than apple, has their pulse on the general sentiment of the changes. If there were a way to magically change the default app, I would leave it where it is. Negativity is always louder than positivity.

 

[iHorseHead]

Apple ruining the Photos app is a great reminder that you the customer doesn’t even truly own your iPhone

I even preferred iPhoto to Photos. I've never liked Photos.

 

[gank41]

This is over 550 votes and is still pretty split.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/does-anybody-actually-like-the-new-ios-18-photos-app-merged.2430437/

 

[robertcoogan]

The Photos app sucked even before iOS 18 came out.

Why can't I load photos from my Mac on my iPhone?

 

[Reboo00oot]

Whatever happened to "it just works" philosophy?

 

[john123]

This is over 550 votes and is still pretty split.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/does-anybody-actually-like-the-new-ios-18-photos-app-merged.2430437/

To be clear though, it’s 53% saying they “hate” it and 28% saying it’s “okay,” leaving only 21% saying they “like” it.

 

[laz232]

When I open an album of photos "e.g. from my Mac" on Photos 18 - when I try rapidly scrolling forward and back it frequently thinks I'm swiping 'close' and closes the album returning me to the Photos album selection - how the f do I stop that?

 

[gank41]

For all the folks that don't like the redesign, you're all filing Feedback, right?
(enter this in Safari-- applefeedback:// )

Here's mine, FB14227353. We should all not only be submitting Feedback, but we should try referencing other's Feedback ID #'s, too.

 

[I7guy]

To be clear though, it’s 53% saying they “hate” it and 28% saying it’s “okay,” leaving only 21% saying they “like” it.

To be clear, there aren’t enough options. But it’s good enough for government work.

 

[gank41]

To be clear though, it’s 53% saying they “hate” it and 28% saying it’s “okay,” leaving only 21% saying they “like” it.

So half hate it and the other half is pretty mixed between good and whatever.

 

[darngooddesign]

Apple ruining the Photos app is a great reminder that you the customer doesn’t even truly own your iPhone

You own the phone with the version of iOS it came with.

 

[darngooddesign]

You don't have the code, you have access to compiled executable. Regardless of what your government tells you, you don't own the software.

This is kind of a weird, pedantic take on software ownership. Of course you dont own the master code in the same way that when you buy a CD, you own the rights to personally use the music on the disc, but not the master recordings.

 

[darngooddesign]

Apple wouldn’t have made the effort to redo the app without a plan to monetize it. Mark my words you’ll be soon paying for a Photos+ subscription in order to use the AI tools.

V17 Photos app is different from the V1 Photos app but Apple hasn’t monetized those changes.

 

[Jett0516]

Is there a good alternative to the photos app?

 

[gank41]

Is there a good alternative to the photos app?

I've tried using RAWPower as an alternative to the Photos app, but since there's no true way in Settings to have your Photos only populate in another app like that, it's pretty much all moot.