Did Apple change the directory structure for their photos?

Yes, we also use iCloud. Our monthly plans are 200GB for me and 2TB for my wife. The most obvious unfriendly point is it needs $$. However, I am fine to pay if it suits my needs. Unfortunately it does not.

Photo are synergized instantaneously, if you delete a photo in iphone, iCloud delete it too. Means you need to keep the ENTIRE photo Album in your phone (and also iCloud), which hence limited by my iphone storage if I want to keep the photo by original size at phone. I am using a 256GB iphone12 while my wife's is 512GB, we find it is quite bulky to have so so so many photo in the phone. We want to keep some old photo in another storage (i.e. HDD or computer) and free up space in iphone. Seems iCloud is not able to support.

Beside, it is nightmare to turn on the computer and let it download photo from iCloud.... it takes so so so long time.

By the way, I only used 4-5 hours to backup ALL my photo of 150GB by direct "copy and paste" when my photo was IOS14.6. It is also perfectly organized by monthly folders.

When I want to backup my wife's phone, we carelessly updated it to IOS14.7. I spend a whole week to backup by "Import" photo.... but only finished around 50% of it! This transfer way is very very unstable and the hardware are frequently hanged... How can these way be user friendly?

Absolute bummer! Apple - please can you revert it back to the dates (which makes sense and helps people easily locate the photo they are looking for) OR at least give us an option to select which we prefer? As somebody who takes A LOT of photos, this would really make my back up life easier

I totally agree. I was so excited and happy to see that update (subdirectories are of form 2021_8). But it reverted to the previous format again. I was so disappointed. >_< iTune never works for me for my computer. I was not even able to download in my computer so I have had to transfer my photos manually to my computers. With the format of dates. It is so much easier to view and find my photos. Wonder if it's even possible to have options for users to choose whatever format they want in the setting?

Well, in that regard, they have failed, and for many years!

That update was a very "short-term" fortunate step in the right direction, but it seems they have reverted it, and thus back to making things difficult. And that translates into "the user experience"

Exactly! the improvement of changing folder to Year_Month in ISO14.6 was an amazing improvement in right direction. But it seems to me that Apple is afraid of "change"...... even through the change brings benefit to users.

I don't want to alarm you all but I think the month folders may be back.... YAAAAY! I am on iOS 15.0.2 and when I went to back up tonight, my folders are back to 202109_.

Although some months have multiple month folders, with a letter afterwards. Such as 202109_h. Does anyone know why that might be?

Lilaclaura wrote:

I don't want to alarm you all but I think the month folders may be back.... YAAAAY! I am on iOS 15.0.2 and when I went to back up tonight, my folders are back to 202109_.

Although some months have multiple month folders, with a letter afterwards. Such as 202109_h. Does anyone know why that might be?

You are unlikely to get an answer (and certainly not in this user-to-user forum), but Apple structures the folders to optimize the performance of the Photos database, not for your use or convenience.

What Lawrence means is that you and everyone else on this forum, people who are actually intelligent enough to even discover that these directory formats exist, aren't worthy of knowing Apple's secrets. As for "optimizing performance", I highly doubt that adding "_h" to the end of a folder name makes anything more efficient.

I honestly wonder how many non-answers you have to give on this forum to build up 100k+ points.

Then you are honestly CLUELESS about how points are awarded. Do you normally spout off based on no knowledge whatsoever? There is only one way to get points (other than the 4 points you get just for posting once, as you did). Post a response to a NEW post (that’s the first post in a thread) that the original poster marks as Helpful (5 points) or Solved (10 points). So my almost 150,000 points means that somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 original posters thought my responses were helpful or solved their problem. I’m sorry you didn’t find my post helpful.

"You should never have copied photos from the iPhone’s folder structure" really?, been doing that way for 10+ years and never had to deal with this crap before, internal storage/DCIM/APPLE100 you see, I don't want to load up my computer with crap like Itunes et/al and other software... It negates the point of using it as a mass storage device.

also, I don't want to sound difficult, but just who are you to make that kind of statement any way?, you might use yours one way, but, we all are not you...

Just saying

PS. IDC about points LOL

With all the chatter about how the Iphone is the best thing since sliced bread, I decided to get one, if I could get my money back, I would...

As far as Mister (I am an apple g0d, you must obey me) Finch, it seems he cares not to acknowledge anything that he has not decreed...

oh well, we live, we learn...

Listen hear Lawrence the Nazi! You don't worry about what the end user does. Copy and paste is a fundamental windows command and I've been saving pictures since the iPhone 3 using copy and paste. Your attitude about what the end user can do is not your concern. I'm just as ****** as everybody else when fundamental changes are made with out telling the end users who are paying big money to upgrade these phones every 2 years. stick to relevant tech help and leave your opinions to yourself

I just upgraded from iPhone Pro Max 11 with 14.6 where it was indeed year_month (great improvement!) to IPhone Pro Max 13 with OS 15.1.1 and now it is yearmonth__ or yearmonth_a, yearmonth_b, yearmonth_c,.... which is a major downgrade....

It is a change introduced recently, but I don’t know when. Don’t be alarmed, it’s like this with all iPhones running the latest version of iOS 14.

As I said, use iCloud. Or use the Microsoft importer. Did you bother to read the link I posted?