iOS 18 Photos App: All the New Features and Design Updates

[NoIdentity]

What is NAS linked to photos? And what support you are looking for?

I find Google Photo is leading Apple miles away for the friendliness to photographers.

Google photos supports almost all formats including RAWs, displaying most of the camera and photo metadata.

One very nice but not known to everyone is Google photo tries to estimate the info that was omitted at the time of photo taking. For example, once I took my trustful 5d and mobile to a trip and use either of them when the phone condition was allowed. At the end, Google photo helped fill in the missing location info of the photos taken by the old 5D by using locations captured in the photos taken by the mobiles. Google also auto stitches some of the landscape shots and generates a few beautiful pano photos.

The most of all is Google would once a while prompt me collages and some touching “Now and Then” photos recalling some of my good old memories.

That’s why I subscribed Google services for more storage and trying to move photos to Google storage albeit I have a full backup of photos in my NAS.

Photos on the Mac can have linked photos, meaning that you import images from elsewhere on the computer but do not move them to the Photos Library. The files are only referenced to an outside location (outside of the Photos Library). As of now, Photos doesn't really support linking files that are not on a mac volume (AFPS or MacOS extended). While you can technically link files that are on the NAS it is not recommended or better put supported by Photos.

 

[dburkhanaev]

Photo app is undecooked?

To many the app is overcooked.

Most complaint about swiping down and down for albums. To me it is not an issue as one could customise what to be shown and in what order.

The most annoying is the new UI has got boring (only squared thumbnails in grid view) and less nice looking (all albums are in oval shaped half pic half text buttons.

It wastes a lot of display estates too. Relatively thick gaps kept between photos and two sides in grid view. When pinching out for switching from row of 3 photos to 5 photos, the gap size remain, effectively keeping 6 nos of thick gaps kept between photos and on two sides.

It looks thick gaps between tooth. How could it be looking worser.

Pick a metaphor. Either way, it's inedible for some and barely passable for the majority. To be blunt, I hate it.

 

[Webcat86]

Personally I have no issue with the new app, and am a fan of the albums like trips etc.

But here's my main gripe and question: Apple touts the camera functionality of the iPhone, and the emphasis on the Photos app makes it clear that Apple knows people use their iPhone and iPad heavily to look at photos. So then, why can we still not sync smart albums? It makes no sense to me. Even if we can't create them on a mobile device, what possible reason can there be to not at least show them?

I made 5 smart albums today, basically sorting my library into multiple folders that filter by specific dates. This is also an obvious way to sort a large library of kids' photos. But to see those folders on my phone or iPad I'd need to recreate them as manual folders.

 

[timeislove]

Personally I have no issue with the new app, and am a fan of the albums like trips etc.

But here's my main gripe and question: Apple touts the camera functionality of the iPhone, and the emphasis on the Photos app makes it clear that Apple knows people use their iPhone and iPad heavily to look at photos. So then, why can we still not sync smart albums? It makes no sense to me. Even if we can't create them on a mobile device, what possible reason can there be to not at least show them?

I made 5 smart albums today, basically sorting my library into multiple folders that filter by specific dates. This is also an obvious way to sort a large library of kids' photos. But to see those folders on my phone or iPad I'd need to recreate them as manual folders.

I like the new trip view too.

There is a bug that the view sometime displays the period of time in lieu of the trip locations.

I thought it was due to incomplete curation but it is not.

 

[timborama]

Personally I have no issue with the new app, and am a fan of the albums like trips etc.

But here's my main gripe and question: Apple touts the camera functionality of the iPhone, and the emphasis on the Photos app makes it clear that Apple knows people use their iPhone and iPad heavily to look at photos. So then, why can we still not sync smart albums? It makes no sense to me. Even if we can't create them on a mobile device, what possible reason can there be to not at least show them?

I made 5 smart albums today, basically sorting my library into multiple folders that filter by specific dates. This is also an obvious way to sort a large library of kids' photos. But to see those folders on my phone or iPad I'd need to recreate them as manual folders.

Right, there are no smart albums. There is no Recents album/view. There is a Recently Saved album, but it contains NO photos (just grabs and downloaded images) like WTF Apple?!?

 

[Webcat86]

Right, there are no smart albums. There is no Recents album/view. There is a Recently Saved album, but it contains NO photos (just grabs and downloaded images) like WTF Apple?!?

Yeah but there has never been smart albums, that’s my point. It’s a bizarre and presumably arbitrary exclusion.

 

[dperetti]

The change to the Photos app is indeed a downgrade with worst usability.

I have professional tools to work with photography and yet Photos was just better at managing and displaying personal images. I would have moved all of my personal photos to Lightroom classic, but Photos did bring something more to the table, while still being pretty decent.

This change feels like using web app instead of an actual app. Having some separation between views is very useful, even before I disliked that you had to scroll so far for utilities. But it was still better than this.

I have to concur that the day view was a nice way to look back at your days at past pictures. Easier and more manageable than gor example Lightroom.

And in addition th we have made albums now very gard to navigate. O have folders and albums in and a good amount of albums on its own, this wierd scrool system just makes everything so hard to be seen from afar.

This app now needs a lot of work to get back at what it was just a few days ago.

Why bake something that worked so well.

They removed the Days view from MacOS Sequoia as well!! 🤦‍♂️

 

[DarthLincoln]

iOS18 Photos seems to be designed only for people who sync their photos to iCloud, which makes it a disaster for someone like me who only syncs photos to my local Mac computer’s SDD.

For someone like me, there are 3 locations of photos: Local on my device (Camera Roll), iCloud (shared albums/photos) and my computer (sync’s photos From My Mac). iOS18 Photos wants to mush all this together. Thankfully, there is still a distinct and separate group for “Shared Albums” and “From My Mac”, but the old device-specific Camera Roll view is gone buried under Pinned Collections as ”Recently Saved”. There’s no way to make this group prominently featured and a default view. Viewing the main library by Recently Added is confusing since it mixes in recent additions to Shared Albums.

At the very least, “Recently Saved” or “Camera Roll” should be a filter on the main library view, and on any of the Media Type collections so i can focus just on the content on my device.

While the technology is impressive, I don’t care for the automated collections like Trips, Memories, Featured Photos, Wallpaper Suggestions, People & Pets etc.. It’s all a little Big Brother to me (like we are destined to live on the Axiom spaceship in Wall-E). I don’t need or want an algorithm to curate my life for me.

EDIT: crossed out the stuff i said which was wrong.

 

[timeislove]

iOS18 Photos seems to be designed only for people who sync their photos to iCloud, which makes it a disaster for someone like me who only syncs photos to my local Mac computer’s SDD.

For someone like me, there are 3 locations of photos: Local on my device (Camera Roll), iCloud (shared albums/photos) and my computer (sync’s photos From My Mac). iOS18 Photos wants to mush all this together. Thankfully, there is still a distinct and separate group for “Shared Albums” and “From My Mac”, but the old device-specific Camera Roll view is buried under Pinned Collections as ”Recently Saved”. There’s no way to make this group prominently featured and a default view. Viewing the main library by Recently Added is confusing since it mixes in recent additions to Shared Albums.

At the very least, “Recently Saved” or “Camera Roll” should be a filter on the main library view, and on any of the Media Type collections so i can focus just on the content on my device.

While the technology is impressive, I don’t care for the automated collections like Trips, Memories, Featured Photos, Wallpaper Suggestions, People & Pets etc.. It’s all a little Big Brother to me (like we are destined to live on the Axiom spaceship in Wall-E). I don’t need or want an algorithm to curate my life for me.

it sounds like some of the folks here really have affection on "camera roll".

what good is it compared with "Recent"?

as far as i know, the camera roll is kind of a FIFO buffer of around 1000 nos. of photos.

 

[NoIdentity]

d

iOS18 Photos seems to be designed only for people who sync their photos to iCloud, which makes it a disaster for someone like me who only syncs photos to my local Mac computer’s SDD.

For someone like me, there are 3 locations of photos: Local on my device (Camera Roll), iCloud (shared albums/photos) and my computer (sync’s photos From My Mac). iOS18 Photos wants to mush all this together. Thankfully, there is still a distinct and separate group for “Shared Albums” and “From My Mac”, but the old device-specific Camera Roll view is buried under Pinned Collections as ”Recently Saved”. There’s no way to make this group prominently featured and a default view. Viewing the main library by Recently Added is confusing since it mixes in recent additions to Shared Albums.

At the very least, “Recently Saved” or “Camera Roll” should be a filter on the main library view, and on any of the Media Type collections so i can focus just on the content on my device.

While the technology is impressive, I don’t care for the automated collections like Trips, Memories, Featured Photos, Wallpaper Suggestions, People & Pets etc.. It’s all a little Big Brother to me (like we are destined to live on the Axiom spaceship in Wall-E). I don’t need or want an algorithm to curate my life for me.

Didn't even noticed that before. I can't even find the camera roll in the pinned section. Strange choice indeed.

 

[timborama]

iOS18 Photos seems to be designed only for people who sync their photos to iCloud, which makes it a disaster for someone like me who only syncs photos to my local Mac computer’s SDD.

For someone like me, there are 3 locations of photos: Local on my device (Camera Roll), iCloud (shared albums/photos) and my computer (sync’s photos From My Mac). iOS18 Photos wants to mush all this together. Thankfully, there is still a distinct and separate group for “Shared Albums” and “From My Mac”, but the old device-specific Camera Roll view is buried under Pinned Collections as ”Recently Saved”. There’s no way to make this group prominently featured and a default view. Viewing the main library by Recently Added is confusing since it mixes in recent additions to Shared Albums.

At the very least, “Recently Saved” or “Camera Roll” should be a filter on the main library view, and on any of the Media Type collections so i can focus just on the content on my device.

While the technology is impressive, I don’t care for the automated collections like Trips, Memories, Featured Photos, Wallpaper Suggestions, People & Pets etc.. It’s all a little Big Brother to me (like we are destined to live on the Axiom spaceship in Wall-E). I don’t need or want an algorithm to curate my life for me.

Agree 100%, except Recently Saved is not Recents. Recently Saved, as it is implemented in 18, excludes camera photos (it’s just screen grabs and saved images from email, etc).

For me I live in the Roll and Albums synced from my Mac. Even shared albums are useless IMO for personal organization/consumption, as metadata is hidden in favor of a huge comments area. Shared albums are fine for just that… sharing with others.

 

[DarthLincoln]

Agree 100%, except Recently Saved is not Recents. Recently Saved, as it is implemented in 18, excludes camera photos (it’s just screen grabs and saved images from email, etc).

For me I live in the Roll and Albums synced from my Mac. Even shared albums are useless IMO for personal organization/consumption, as metadata is hidden in favor of a huge comments area. Shared albums are fine for just that… sharing with others.

@timborama You’re right - I was using my iPad at the time which i rarely use to take photos, only downloads from email, web, etc.. I later checked my iphone and realized “Recently Saved” is pretty useless. This is so infuriating. I am like you - on my iphone, I primarily operate in the camera roll photos and albums synced from my Mac.

it sounds like some of the folks here really have affection on "camera roll".

what good is it compared with "Recent"?

as far as i know, the camera roll is kind of a FIFO buffer of around 1000 nos. of photos.

@timeislove the problem with “Recent“ is that it contains everything. The issue here is mostly with Shared Albums:
I keep a few Shared Albums of things I want to reference later (interesting plants, cars, hairstyle, iPhone wallpaper) which contains images mostly from internet that i don’t care to “own” on my device or download to my mac. So I save it to a Shared Album and then delete it from my iPhone. I don’t want to see these images when browsing my library and camera roll - I only want to see these when i am looking for a specific reference in my Shared Album.

d

Didn't even noticed that before. I can't even find the camera roll in the pinned section. Strange choice indeed.

@NoIdentity Yeah I was wrong. I thought “Recently Saved” was the same as the old Camera Roll.

So the only way i found to just look at my Camera Roll images is not to use Photos, but to use the Camera app. Open the Camera app, look at the previously taken photo, and then scroll backwards to see all the previous photos in the camera roll on my device. But this is just a linear list that is tedious to use. There is no way to view this collection on the full screen like we used to be able to do in Photos before iOS18.

 

[dburkhanaev]

iOS18 Photos seems to be designed only for people who sync their photos to iCloud, which makes it a disaster for someone like me who only syncs photos to my local Mac computer’s SDD.

For someone like me, there are 3 locations of photos: Local on my device (Camera Roll), iCloud (shared albums/photos) and my computer (sync’s photos From My Mac). iOS18 Photos wants to mush all this together. Thankfully, there is still a distinct and separate group for “Shared Albums” and “From My Mac”, but the old device-specific Camera Roll view is gone buried under Pinned Collections as ”Recently Saved”. There’s no way to make this group prominently featured and a default view. Viewing the main library by Recently Added is confusing since it mixes in recent additions to Shared Albums.

At the very least, “Recently Saved” or “Camera Roll” should be a filter on the main library view, and on any of the Media Type collections so i can focus just on the content on my device.

While the technology is impressive, I don’t care for the automated collections like Trips, Memories, Featured Photos, Wallpaper Suggestions, People & Pets etc.. It’s all a little Big Brother to me (like we are destined to live on the Axiom spaceship in Wall-E). I don’t need or want an algorithm to curate my life for me.

EDIT: crossed out the stuff i said which was wrong.

I chose to customize and remove nearly all of the curated content selections. They are otiose for inline photo viewing and especially selection.

 

[DarthLincoln]

I chose to customize and remove nearly all of the curated content selections. They are otiose for inline photo viewing and especially selection.

Smart. I did the same.

It Is surprising, given how much Apple brags about their camera technology, that the Photos app makes a collection for “Recently Saved” but doesn’t have a collection for “Recently Taken” or “Recently Photographed” to highlight images captured by the device’s camera.

If Apple really thinks their iPhone has the best camera performance, they would have a way to focus on just the Camera Roll.

 

[dburkhanaev]

Smart. I did the same.

Is surprising, given how much Apple brags about their camera technology, that the Photos app makes a collection for “Recently Saved” but doesn’t have a collection for “Recently Taken” or “Recently Photographed” to highlight images captured by the device’s camera.

If Apple really thinks their iPhone has the best camera performance, they would have a way to focus on just the Camera Roll.

I think domestically Apple has had little competition. They’re grabbing what little, different features exist in Android and making an Apple implementation of them inline with their own OS. It’s feeling disjointed, cluttered, and at times not intuitive or easy to use. But what is egregious is that it’s becoming, in some cases, uglier to use their OS softwares on the various devices.

I think the lack of competition has bred lack of innovation as well. I know that this technology is a mature segment now. But I don’t need stunning new features or wholesale app redesigns. At this point, ease, polish, and refinement is what I want.

 

[MrAverigeUser]

concerning "Photos" App...

OMG - I hope they are smart enough to let their customers choose if they want to stay with the old and nice "Photos" arrangement or not. For me the old Photos App is largely enough for the moment. And I bet there are millions who think like I do....

If they try to force us customers to switch to the "new" Photos App the customers will surely "not be amused at all"....

A lot of them wil NOT update from 18.1 to 18.2 ...

 

[racerhomie]

I honestly hate the iOS 18 Photos App. I loved the iOS 17 Photos app a lot. There is no way for us to get it back, sadly