Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Exactly right. Without warning or notice, Apple essentially deleted the metadata that defined what photos were in Camera Roll. The fact our photos are still there is little consolation.

To anyone who thinks this isn't a big deal, do you use LightRoom or any similar photo organizer? What if all the metadata defining what collections/albums your photos were in was deleted, and all your photos were put in one big folder? Would you feel good because the photos themselves were not deleted?

Admittedly Camera Roll was one "album", but deleting any metadata whatsoever is a very serious step, especially if done without warning.

I am very surprised the trade press has not picked up on this and covered it more broadly.
Metadata wasn't erased. Just one automatic method of displaying the photos by lumping them all together was removed. I believe the MyRoll app can still do it.
 
Separted by time and place. Perhaps visually not as fulfilling in some way, but rationally much more organized and straightforward than a large grid of everything where you just scroll around to find things and have no idea when or where something was taken short of just remembering it. It's different for sure and looks different but seems like it offers useful things with the way it's displayed.

Except "just scrolling through" a large chuck of stuff is how many many humans handle building situational awareness and formulating actions under uncertainty. "Hmmm... I want to post a picture of the family. Which one? What background? What haircut on Bob? I'll scroll through and jog my memory".

I've has this discussion with my development team several times in the last two years where they want to implement elegant structured UI elements that will remove the ability of the domain-knowledgeable users to view and grok large amounts of data at one gulp. "They'll get used to it", "They're working the wrong way - they should use our method" and "They're just resistant to change" are the usual throw-outs. Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.
 
Except "just scrolling through" a large chuck of stuff is how many many humans handle building situational awareness and formulating actions under uncertainty. "Hmmm... I want to post a picture of the family. Which one? What background? What haircut on Bob? I'll scroll through and jog my memory".

I've has this discussion with my development team several times in the last two years where they want to implement elegant structured UI elements that will remove the ability of the domain-knowledgeable users to view and grok large amounts of data at one gulp. "They'll get used to it", "They're working the wrong way - they should use our method" and "They're just resistant to change" are the usual throw-outs. Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.
That's why when on a computer we just want to see endless lists of files so we can pick aomething that we need? No, they are organized so we can find what we want easier. Seems like having photos separated by dates/places is fairly rational and follows most things in life.
 
That's why when on a computer we just want to see endless lists of files so we can pick aomething that we need? No, they are organized so we can find what we want easier. Seems like having photos separated by dates/places is fairly rational and follows most things in life.

Organization is kind of a secondary problem here. The primary problem is the underlying philosophy: that all of your files live on Apple's servers and that all photos are treated equally when all photos are not equal. What's being missed here is that, for any number of reasons, people don't want every photo appearing on every device and they most certainly don't want every photo uploaded to Apple's servers. The point of the camera roll was the ability to see what photos were actually on the device. Concurrently the photo stream showed what files were on Apple's servers. Before this new system you could manage them independently, which I'd wager to guess is the prefered behavior for most people. Now there's no distinction made so no management of these files is possible anymore.

Apple is asking you to put a huge amount of trust in them and, in the case of someone like me with a very extensive photo library, $20 per month to rent iCloud storage space for it that I don't really want in the first place.
 
Segmented and separated to hell and back... I want one place I can scroll through all of them

I have found the camera roll. It is located in the Camera app. Open the camera app and choose the icon that shows the last picture that you took, it will take you to something called 'all photos' That your camera roll. In its entirety.
 
No metadata was deleted, just the way the photos are arrange? (i.e. what metadata is actually uised to sort the files).

For all practical purposes, the metadata was deleted. Whether it was physically deleted or just deactivated makes no difference -- it has the same result. Namely, the photos formerly collected in Camera Roll are now scattered, and can only be organized by date or location.

It is metadata that defines what albums or collections the photos are in. The fact the photos themselves were not deleted from Camera Roll doesn't change that.

No rational person wants to lose metadata that organizes photos into albums or collections. Yet that is what Apple has done, and without warning.

It would be one thing if they posted a warning that said starting with iOS 9 Camera Roll will go away, you have 1 year to get your photos out of there and into other albums. They did nothing, just bam!!! Camera Roll gone and photos scattered to the winds.
 
Let me get you a diaper and warm milk.

----------



Wrong again. It gets put in the RECENTLY ADDED album, regardless of date. So in other words, anything you just added to your phone goes in that album. However, it WILL be in chrono order on the Photos section of the app.

I just tested this myself with a few old photos I downloaded to my device from Google Drive and a few from the Save Photo option in Facebook.

You guys are complaining for no reason.
So you're cool with having to delete yours photos twice? I'm already sick of the recently deleted section.
 
For all practical purposes, the metadata was deleted. Whether it was physically deleted or just deactivated makes no difference -- it has the same result. Namely, the photos formerly collected in Camera Roll are now scattered, and can only be organized by date or location.

It is metadata that defines what albums or collections the photos are in. The fact the photos themselves were not deleted from Camera Roll doesn't change that.

No rational person wants to lose metadata that organizes photos into albums or collections. Yet that is what Apple has done, and without warning.

It would be one thing if they posted a warning that said starting with iOS 9 Camera Roll will go away, you have 1 year to get your photos out of there and into other albums. They did nothing, just bam!!! Camera Roll gone and photos scattered to the winds.

Not to get into the thick of this debate (which is absurd, I have to agree with those who say so), but the Camera Roll's functionality has always been redundant. All it was was a chronological collection of all of your photos. It was sorted only by time--nothing else. All they did was change the name of it to "Photos," make it into a tab, and grouped its contents by location in addition to time/date. Since you can't be at radically different places at the same time, it produces no noticeable conflicts whatsoever. All they did was add an additional layer of sorting [by default] onto Camera Roll and changed the name.

They said they were going to do this a year ago when they talked about location-based sorting (the iOS 7 keynote talked about how everybody has been laboring with all of their photos being kept in one big long list and that "there is a better way! [laughter and applause]").

I've read this thread, and a half dozen articles and rants like it on iMore and Macrumors and while Camera Roll has obviously been removed, I have yet to see one piece of functionality that has been taken away. No, in fact, the Photos app has become more logically arranged. You may not like it, but that does not mean functionality has been taken from you.

So you're cool with having to delete yours photos twice? I'm already sick of the recently deleted section.

This is a different issue than what is being discussed here. (Also, if you had Photo Stream enabled, you were already deleting your photos twice, even before Recently Deleted was created.)
 
The Photos tab sorts by date, yes...but the date that's IN THE EXIF DATA. Date taken, not date added.

That's the problem.

Pre-iOS 8, if I saved a photo from a website it would show up right at the end of the Camera Roll, easily accessible and easy to find.

Post-iOS 8, if that photo is from, say, the middle of last year, it gets mixed up among the hundreds of other photos I took last year and I have to go hunt for it.

So no it's not the same. There should be a toggle in the Photos view to switch between the "Collections" view and the old camera roll-style simple "grid" view.

This. Spot on.
 
This. Spot on.

Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Apple is expecting you to upload your entire photo library to their cloud servers and they're taking away your ability to manage photos on a device by device level. Either a photo is on all your devices or it's on none of them. This will become much more evident when they roll out the Cloud Drive part, assuming they haven't changed this horrible plan by then.
 
Not to get into the thick of this debate (which is absurd, I have to agree with those who say so), but the Camera Roll's functionality has always been redundant. All it was was a chronological collection of all of your photos. It was sorted only by time--nothing else. All they did was change the name of it to "Photos," make it into a tab, and grouped its contents by location in addition to time/date. Since you can't be at radically different places at the same time, it produces no noticeable conflicts whatsoever. All they did was add an additional layer of sorting [by default] onto Camera Roll and changed the name.

This simply isn't true and by stating it as fact you're willfully spreading disinformation. Camera roll wasn't simply renamed. It was removed and replaced with a list of all photos, whether they exist on the device or on the cloud. Previously camera roll only showed images that were actually on the phone.

The reason for the change is the reason it's problematic. Apple is applying the same system it wants to use for documents (save it one place, access it everywhere) to photos. But photos are a special case. Unlike documents we generally don't want them to appear everywhere. We want a lot more control over them than that. Under iCloud Drive the idea is that if ANY photo is in your library it's also on your phone and your iPad and in your AppleTV's photo stream etc. regardless of whether you want it to be. If you delete it from one of those devices it gets removed from all of them.

And this isn't even touching on the huge issue of Apple assuming that we're all just fine with the idea of having every single photo we take or import or download being automatically uploaded to their servers and distributed to all of our devices.

So no, what you described is wrong. It isn't just a name change or a streamlining of the existing system. It's a completely new approach to photo and document management that takes the bulk of the user's ability to directly manage these files out of our hands and places them in Apple's along with asking us to trust them with our personal and in many cases copywriten images. How anyone doesn't see this as an issue is beyond me.
 
I didn't read the entire thread here, but came via another post I made skirting around this problem.

I don't have a problem with Apple renaming or repurposing Camera Roll for one reason or another. I don't mind that the new version of it is more searchable by being broken down into regions, dates etc in the manner it is.

What's broken however, seemingly (unless someone else can tell me otherwise) is that apps which previously had access to Camera Roll - Twitter for example - now don't have access to the complete library.

A scenario of this is if I want to reply to a tweet from the twitter app with a photo that's older than the 30 day (or whatever it is) limit that Recently Added filters to.

The only way I can tweet an older photo is by finding it first - THEN sharing - which at it's core is a few steps longer than it was previously, but the method of replying to a tweet with an old photo has fundamentally been canned.

And that's kinda uncool.
 
So you're cool with having to delete yours photos twice? I'm already sick of the recently deleted section.

Recently Deleted deletes itself after 30 days. I delete once. And if I wasn't, deleting twice was something I got used to since Photostream was launched.
 
You know I love Apple but this is a bogus move. Neither Twitter or Facebook can see "Collections".

We just need an "all photos" view. Granted, most photos used on Twitter or Facebook are "just taken" but not always. PIA to have to go navigate externally to place the file in an album to use it.
 
Perhaps I'm another control freak. I want the ability to show only photos on my device and in the cloud, separately. Photostream has always been a bit of a mystery. I can setup another device and it won't show everything that's in another device. It seems to only syncs photos in the past 30 days, but it's not always the case.

And what's even worse for me is iPhoto no longer works in iOS8, and I *bought* iPhoto became it became free :mad: I had two albums nicely organized and captioned in iPhoto. No more, gone :mad: It's now all lumped togehter in a single pile of mess :mad:
 
So you're cool with having to delete yours photos twice? I'm already sick of the recently deleted section.

Recently deleted also functions as sort of like the trash on Mac. If you accidentally delete a photo, then it's in the recently deleted section and you can recover it. Visual Voicemail has the same thing. You delete a voicemail and then there is a deleted section and if you're sure you want to get rid of it then you delete it from there.
 
Point out where in the changelog it states that reading it will bring back the cameraroll please. I'd love to see it.

----------



And some of you are like my 2 year old niece and can't read.

Oh....we can read.....we just don't care about pedantic people who want nothing to change, ever.

----------

I'm already sick of the recently deleted section.

I can tell you, I'm FAR MORE sick of the whining on this website, than I am the very handy Recently Deleted section.

----------

This simply isn't true and by stating it as fact you're willfully spreading disinformation. Camera roll wasn't simply renamed. It was removed and replaced with a list of all photos, whether they exist on the device or on the cloud. Previously camera roll only showed images that were actually on the phone.

The reason for the change is the reason it's problematic. Apple is applying the same system it wants to use for documents (save it one place, access it everywhere) to photos. But photos are a special case. Unlike documents we generally don't want them to appear everywhere. We want a lot more control over them than that. Under iCloud Drive the idea is that if ANY photo is in your library it's also on your phone and your iPad and in your AppleTV's photo stream etc. regardless of whether you want it to be. If you delete it from one of those devices it gets removed from all of them.

And this isn't even touching on the huge issue of Apple assuming that we're all just fine with the idea of having every single photo we take or import or download being automatically uploaded to their servers and distributed to all of our devices.

So no, what you described is wrong. It isn't just a name change or a streamlining of the existing system. It's a completely new approach to photo and document management that takes the bulk of the user's ability to directly manage these files out of our hands and places them in Apple's along with asking us to trust them with our personal and in many cases copywriten images. How anyone doesn't see this as an issue is beyond me.

You're still on and about it? What a joke.

This guy doesn't understand any of it, and is spamming every forum Apple-related on the web with his lack of understanding.
 
I've had an iPhone since the original launch, and have over 11,000 pictures. I used Camera Roll for work constantly. The new method is totally cumbersome and has made daily use much more difficult; whatever the arguments have, for me it's bad, plain and simple. Often during the day I will have to go back to an unspecified date in the last 7 odd years I've had an iPhone, now I have an added problem of navigating apples messy interface.
 
You know I love Apple but this is a bogus move. Neither Twitter or Facebook can see "Collections".

We just need an "all photos" view. Granted, most photos used on Twitter or Facebook are "just taken" but not always. PIA to have to go navigate externally to place the file in an album to use it.

But is that Apple's fault or Facebook and Twitter's fault for not updating their apps to work with iOS8? Isn't this exactly why Apple puts out developer betas so developers can test and adapt their software to the new functions?

If you're a single developer I can imagine not having the time to fix it, but not for the Facebooks and Twitters of this world
 
Oh....we can read.....we just don't care about pedantic people who want nothing to change, ever.

----------



I can tell you, I'm FAR MORE sick of the whining on this website, than I am the very handy Recently Deleted section.

----------



You're still on and about it? What a joke.

This guy doesn't understand any of it, and is spamming every forum Apple-related on the web with his lack of understanding.

Two things occurred to me after reading this reply

1) You ether cannot read or the subject matter is beyond your metal capacity to understand

2) You're also still "on and about it"

"pot, kettle, black" mean anything to you?
 
But is that Apple's fault or Facebook and Twitter's fault for not updating their apps to work with iOS8? Isn't this exactly why Apple puts out developer betas so developers can test and adapt their software to the new functions?

If you're a single developer I can imagine not having the time to fix it, but not for the Facebooks and Twitters of this world

I think you're possibly correct. I've noticed that since the update, photo upload behaviour has become a little sketchy. For example, I've found Google Drive will often crash when trying to upload a photo (and it seemed fine before I updated).
 
Bring Back Camera Roll!

Add me to the list of users pissed that Camera Roll has been removed from iOS. I had 1500 photos in my Camera Roll and now I have 149 in Recently Added folder. Way to eff up something that wasn't broken Apple. Bring back Camera Roll!
 
My photos are gone. Not just camera roll. Every tip I have found is basically the same - click the photos button in photos.app and using the menu at the top, go up to the top-most level (years). Nope - I have a few photos I took in August and Sept. Some I've had for years - gone.

Either Apple screwed up or I did. Not sure what I would have done to lose them, though.
 
Last edited:
Two things occurred to me after reading this reply

1) You ether cannot read or the subject matter is beyond your metal capacity to understand

2) You're also still "on and about it"

"pot, kettle, black" mean anything to you?

I believe you meant, "mental". For someone giving people grief on reading and comprehension, this is funny.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.