Where did the Camera Roll go in iOS 18

WildBillWilly82 wrote:

Please do not post false information. I have been an iOS user since the beginning. Even at version 17 of iOS, the name “Camera Roll” has still been in use.

Actually, APPLE has not used the term Camera Roll since iOS 13. That is a FACT. Some user have used the term “camera roll” loosely, but that is not a term that Apple uses.

If you scroll right to the bottom, click “customise and reorder”. You can select and deselect as you want to see and can reorder. It still shows the photos above, but if you scroll down you’ll see your albums again :)

sorry, just realised it still doesn’t separate camera roll, but at least it might help someone to find their albums again (I was looking for mine)

That's only partly true. It's true that the camera roll is there in the Camera, but you can only see it one image at a time, so if you want to scroll back to an image you took a while ago it will take a long time. Select/delete is similarly hard.

This won't help many people but it lets me re-create the Camera Roll/Recents/or whatever it was called.

TLDR: If your use-case matches mine (below) then the quickest way to get at the pics that used to be in Camera Roll/Recents/Whatever is to search for "iPhone" in Photos and this will find only photos taken on an iPhone because the camera name goes in the meta-data of the images. I appreciate that this won't help most people here cos my use-case is a bit odd.

My use-case is that I only use the iPhone camera for snapshots/convenience. Say a product label if I want to buy something or an amplifier wiring before I take it apart or a quick scan of a document that I might need or a baking disaster to share with mates in the pub. Just temp stuff that I might or might not need to keep but can't be bothered to delete. These don't get synched to my Mac or to the cloud or anywhere - they reside only on the phone and should I want to keep them then I import them to the Mac, delete them from the iPhone and add them to the set of folders that get synched to the iPhone from my Mac . Then, I have a number of cameras that I use to take photos I want to keep that will go in my database and these synch between Mac and iPhone via Finder and USB. I also have a bunch of scanned photos going back to the 1960s which are also synched between Mac and iPhone via Finder and USB. These pics are all tagged with the camera or scanner model so they don't show up in the "iPhone" search.

I don't think it matters, but note also that I don't use Photos on Mac. I use a semi-pro image management programme that better meets my needs. When I do import pics taken on an iPhone I can easily change the camera from iPhone to something else so that it doesn't appear in the "iPhone" search described above.

Before I could take a photo, edit, send it out and delete. Now it is messy.

probably changes inspired by AI mood - let's decide for user how it shall be done ... who care about user really

frustrating and contr-productive

Please put Camera Roll back in next push. I can't accept this new ugly design.

Have you bothered to read ANYTHING in the 7 page thread you posted to? From your post it sounds like you didn’t bother.

And the camera roll has been gone for 5 years. Where have you been for the past 5 years?

And NO, I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to put the camera roll back!

tom_993 wrote:

Using MS Photos appears to be the solution for me. I've always used Windows Explorer to download photos, but MS Photos seems to work better, plus it's what Apple recommends and supports.

When I open MS Photos with my phone connected, it shows what is on my camera roll. I can bulk select and download them to my PC from here. They are all in one place, which is nice, as Explorer seemed to have some strangely named folders and I had to open all of them. It also seems I can bulk select and delete from MS Photos. I was always careful not to do that with Explorer, as it can corrupt the photos database.

Give this a try if you're on a PC. It's possible that the instructions in that link for Mac's will do something similar.

Thanks, Tom. The equivalent app for Mac is Apple Image Capture.

Pictures may still be there, I look for hours to find anything...

the only way I could find a certain picture, was to connect the phone to my computer and go through the folders in explorer to find it ... waste of time.

Bring back the old camera roll please.

wynford wrote:

tom_993 wrote:

delete from MS Photos. I was always careful not to do that with Explorer, as it can corrupt the photos database.

How and why does Explorer corrupt the photos database?

You should probably study the developer documentation for iOS. Basically, iOS has moved beyond files. All native data for Apple’s apps and also 3rd party apps reside in SQLite databases, not files, the photo database included. Photo “files” are actually the leaf nodes of the photo database tree, and one image can have one or more related leaves including metadata for the image, and also editing and image optimizing data. It will also have links to all of the places the photo appears, such as albums. If you just copy the jpg or heic file you lose all that metadata, and if you delete it you break the database tree structure.

mine took a couple days and finally completed, supposedly does it at night when on the charger. I had another issue also, all my synced pictures would show like they were on the map function, but when you clicked down they weren’t there. Currently working with Apple tech on that one. Gave them lots of info and engineering reviewing it if anyone is having a similar issue. It’s just my synced pictures having the issue.

This is good info, thanks. I suspected something like that was going on.

I'm assuming that Microsoft Photos interacts with this database where Windows Explorer does not.

I noticed something interesting though, when I delete photos using MS photos, they are gone from the library on my phone but they do not appear in the recently deleted folder.