Where did the Camera Roll go in iOS 18

I need this back ASAP. The way I use photos is completely broken now. I need a place to see all photos that are on my iphone and have not yet been transferred off my device.

*** EVERYONE Request it to come back here Feedback - Photos - Apple ***

I couldn't agree more. While the new photos app is ok in itself, removing the camera roll was the worst decision someone ever made! I want to see what is in my camera roll and only my camera roll! I don't want to hunt through hundreds of photos I sync'd over to my phone. I want to see what is in my camera roll only. And the only way I see this possible, is by literally removing any photos from the phone that are not in the camera roll. No more saved albums with my favorite photos if I want to be able to find what's in the camera roll.

That is not correct! I move pictures off my phone to my laptop and then sync them back into folders. The camera roll/recents contained everything I have not synced back. The library is now just EVERYTHING, there isn't a way to differentiate between what is on the phone and what has been synced back, it's all together. Many of need the functionality of the old camera roll/recent for the way we organize things.

I don't think you understand the issue here, the problem is that in the new Library all of the pictures are mixed together, the camera roll pictures as well as the pictures already synced to albums in our Macs. We need the camera roll back where we could see only the pictures that we hadn't yet synced to the computer. I had pictures there that I hadn't wanted to sync that were from a year ago and now I can't find them because they're mixed in together with all the rest and I would have to go through literally hundreds of pictures to find them. Apple needs to bring the Camera Roll back ASAP!!!!

I need camera roll!

I totally agree - Camera Roll is sacred - I don’t need Apple’s idea of what is important to Me! I have 84,000 photos all in my iphone mostly already categorised in folders which I have specially created and synced.

I don’t want to have to negotiate those albums on my camera roll. Keep it simple Apple as before.

Camera roll is Camera Roll - not All Roll ! !

Douglas

Please bring back our Camera Roll. I can't go thru 27,000 pics to find a picture I chose not to sync to my Mac. Please update this app to include the camera roll asap. If I had known this before,I would have never updated my phone.

They are the same thing only if you never sync your photos to your computer, otherwise they are most definitely not. For us who do sync our pictures to the computer, the "camera roll" or "recents" folder only kept the pictures taken on your phone that had not yet been synced. For people who sync not being able to have those pics separate can be a real issue.

No it's not. The camera roll was literally everything you took with the camera and screen shot that had not been moved off the device. No it's "library" which is EVERYTHING, including pictures you moved off the device, added to a folder and added back to the phone. Camera roll and library are two completely different things.

Well said.

Lots of people are reporting here that the Recents (aka Camera Roll) functionality has disappeared from the Photos app with iOS 18. Others are stating that it has not. Assuming that we are all rational beings, there must be an explanation for these different perceptions. I think that the most likely explanation lies in the different ways people use the Photos app. For example, some people sync their photos to iCloud, while others (including me) do not. This would result in differing user experiences. Similarly, some people sync some of their photos from their Macs (or other devices) to their phones and others do not. That too would result in differing user experiences. There may be yet other differences in the use of the Photos app which would affect this issue.

The bottom line, however, is that for a sizeable number of users iOS 18 (including me) has introduced a catastrophic change. Some people on this forum report that they have found a workaround, using the Camera app. Unfortunately, this does not work on my phone (as I have mentioned earlier). I have no idea why.

Lawrence - before iOS18 there was a thing in Photos called Recents that I could hit and see only the pictures that I had taken with my iPhone. None of the other pictures, synched from my Mac, could be seen - they were in a different set of folders called "From My Mac". Some users, including me, clearly found this very useful.

This folder called Recents is no longer there. There is a folder called "Recent Days" which has every photo on my phone inclucing those synched with my Mac - which is not useful for me. The Library also includes every picture on my phone. There is now no way to easily isolate the pictures taken on my iPhone from all my other pictures and this is a bit of a pain for me and the way I use my iPhone photos. The camera roll in the Camera app replicates this with the important exception that the thumbnails are only visible as a single row, not a grid, which makes it much less useable for people like me who use iPhone and Photos the way we do.

Apple has removed/changed the Recents functionality and that's why users are complaining. The fact that you don't understand why this is a pain probably means that your use-case for the iPhone and the Photos is different from mine and other users. It doesn't mean that users who are pointing out that a major part of the Photos app functionality has been taken away are wrong and should be scolded for complaining about it.

I've just tried this on my iPhone 13 and there isn't a small picture in the bottom left corner of the Camera app. If I tap on that (empty) location, I get a blank screen with text in the centre, saying "No Photos or Videos ...". In the top right corner of this screen is an "All Photos" button. Clicking on it, takes me to the Library. Going back to the Camera app, if I take a photo, then the corresponding thumbnail appears in the bottom left corner. When I tap on it, the photo appears. When I go back to the Camera app, the photo is gone and the text "No Photos or Videos ..." is displayed in the top right corner. The new photo is now present in the Library.

I desperately need the Camera Roll aka Recents functionality. As others have said, having the unsorted photos mixed up with photos I've synced from my Mac is useless.

You can see the camera roll from the camera app, not the photos app. But you can’t see them in a grid. You have to delete them one by one. There’s no way (at least that I’ve found) to select a bunch (or all) and delete in bulk.

not true. it's very different now because those of us that move pictures out of "camera roll" or recents , would normally not have anything in the "library" or camera roll except the pictures taken that were not moved to a folder. I do this for a few reasons, one of which is that I have a backup on my pc of the files but more than that is because that's how I did it originally and if I removed them now, you cannot put the pics back in the 'library' or whatever it's now called.

so i have to leave it like this and now I have a zillion pics in there that I have to scroll through to see the recent pics I took.

if you want to call it recent instead of cameral roll that's fine but that "folder" is needed back to only house the pics recently taken and nothing else. not sure how people can say it's the same its not for us that have files organized differently and that cant change that. I don't want to scroll through 10,000 pics to pull up the one I just took a few minutes ago.

the only work around now is the camera method then click on the pic thumbnails at the bottom but you still can't view them properly you can only scroll left to right,

[Edited by Moderator]

weber88 wrote:

I need this back ASAP. The way I use photos is completely broken now. I need a place to see all photos that are on my iphone and have not yet been transferred off my device.

*** EVERYONE Request it to come back here Feedback - Photos - Apple ***

Even better, just use the built in way. Put your finger on the photos showing near the top of the screen and drag down. That will change the view to the full camera roll (now called the “library”)