As you know for the slightly more serious photographer, the photos app on IOS 18 was destroyed. Its ability to see the Recent (Camera Roll) photos as an album was removed. This was an essential feature and now that it's gone the Photos app is useless. What is the best replacement? A replacement app should be able to view albums and treat Camera Roll as a independent album. Advice is appreciated. Thanks.
iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 18
I am deeply disappointed with the new design. As an iPhone user for 13 years, with over 200,000 photos stored on my device, this feels like a major letdown. It seems that Apple is increasingly starting to resemble Android, which is a huge step backward in my opinion. A big minus from me.
I am deeply disappointed with the new design. As an iPhone user for 13 years, with over 200,000 photos stored on my device, this feels like a major letdown. It seems that Apple is increasingly starting to resemble Android, which is a huge step backward in my opinion. A big minus from me.
Feedback goes here:
They promise to read things posted there. They make no such promise about reading things here. I would advise that concrete examples of where you're disappointed with the new design rather than general statements will be most effective.
I agree with not upgrading to IOS 18, I wish I had not upgraded to IOS18. Hopefully a fix will come along soon to allow selected photo folders from iTunes to appear in their corresponding folders on my iPhone..
Does it replicate the old "Recents"? People who are missing Recents don't miss it because it can't find recent pics, they miss it because it used to display only photos taken with the iPhone camera and did not include any pics synched with Mac. This was essential to my workflow and, obviously, many others'.
Also, for those missing pics in Recent Days - the reason is that Recent Days, for some unfathomable reason, only includes days in which 4 or more pictures are taken. However, even if they fix this it still doesn't do what Recents used to.
I just don’t understand IOS 18 photos app. I was just about to order a new larger ipad but I have decided to delay this as the app is just too vague and complicated. The previous version was excellent but I can’t find a way back to it. I used to take a photo , check it in ‘recents’ and edit it. That’s it. Now the photo is not in recently saved and I have to search for it in all the photos. The edit option is now accessed through a random symbol instead of by pressing ‘edit’. Why change it? The AI is very clever but who wants all the irrelevant content it generates. What a shame!
IDK, so far I have just blocked the iOs 18 update and am holding out for any possible fix
I’m not sure about a replacement, but something’s gotta give. I’m a product manager at a software company and I wish I could speak to the PM in charge of the photos app at Apple. I gotta believe he or she isn’t speaking to users regularly and definitely isn't looking at feedback. As a PM I’ve had to shed the thinking that I know better than my users in terms of what they want in our software. Apple still has issues getting rid of this kind of thinking. Please listen to your users Apple and change the Photos app to how it was in iOS 17!
They already tried removing the “camera roll” in the past and so many people spoke out that they brought it back temporarily before changing it to “Recents”. Now they’re trying this. Hopefully they listen one more time. Yall go leave feedback using the link someone provided in this thread!
How do you “sort by recents”?! That doesn’t even make sense grammatically. You either sort by date added or by date created. You can GROUP by recents, but you can’t SORT by recents.
I am so tired of the AI stuff in the Photos app that now I want it back where it was around 2015 or so. At that time I was able to sort my photos as I wanted them, create albums, put photos in the albums, and there was no extra nonsense like 'memories' and 'trips' unless I created them myself.
I have always synced selected Windows photo folders with my
iPhone by putting a tick beside the selected folders in iTunes photos. This no longer
works since I upgraded to IOS 18. Although the folders are still selected in iTunes
they no longer sync as individual folders as they did before the IOS 18 upgrade.
Instead, my selected Windows photo folders now appear in one great mess on my iPhone
11. I can no longer find the folders as before.
My request to Apple is to please correct this situation and allow my selected iTunes photo
folders to appear as photo folders on my iPhone.
I have always used Apple iPhones and was about to upgrade to
iPhone 16. I have never considered Android, however, this disastrous upgrade to
IOS 18 is forcing me to look at an alternative to iPhone.
There's a very minimal app called One Swipe ($5.00) which looks only at Camera Roll. I'm debating whether to pay those five dollars.
I’m looking as well. As of now, there really isn’t anything available. I’m did find one app that resurrects a working “Recents” album, but that’s all it does. No editing, no metadata, etc.
[Edited by Moderator]
SuperMarina wrote:
Lightroom is NOT an alternative to Photos! Photos USED TO BE an app that allowed us to view and organize photos. It no longer is.
Lightroom is a photo editing app. Something else entirely. It does not successfully sync albums with my Mac. It also has a lot of extras I do not want which are distracting and time consuming to deal with.
And it is made by Adobe, so cannot be relied on.
Impressive.So much inaccurate information in one post. Well done:
Lightroom is NOT an alternative to Photos!
Yes it is. It sits in exactly the same place in the workflow as Photos does. Like Photos it's a photo manager. Like Photos it has non-destructive processing (just higher quality tools). Like Photos it can share your images across all your devices - the one difference being that it can also share to Windows and Android devices via native applications as well. Anything Photos can do, Lightroom can do too. And then some.
Photos USED TO BE an app that allowed us to view and organize photos. It no longer is.
Nope. Still is. That hasn't changed. The layout may have but the core capabilities of the app haven't changed one iota. And using block capitals and exclamation marks doesn't really help your argument.
Lightroom is a photo editing app. Something else entirely
I wonder if you're confusing Lightroom with Photoshop. No version of Lightroom is an editor like Photoshop. They are all parametric editors, they work in exactly the same way Photos. It's that alternative thing again.
It does not successfully sync albums with my Mac.
Perhaps you need to take the time to learn how to use it, because it certainly does exactly that for other people. I have more than 100k images managed by Lightroom and the organisation of these images is shared across all our devices.
It also has a lot of extras I do not want which are distracting and time consuming to deal with.
Again, I think we're back to the need to take moment or two to learn how to use the app.
And it is made by Adobe, so cannot be relied on.
And among the inaccuracies that is simply the daftest assertion yet. Adobe are the industry leaders in photography management and editing software. There is simply nobody that comes close. They are a huge corporation, whose applications are used world-wide, in professional and amateur settings. Their apps are the yardstick against which all other apps in this field are compared. I can understand that you may not like the applications, I can understand you may have a chip on your shoulder about the company. But there is no question whatever about Adobe's reliability out here in reality.
That is NOT the same as Recents. The Library contains EVERYTHING, whereas the previous Recents did not. Library includes all my synced albums and photos, whereas previous version of Recents/Roll did not. Library is unweildly when you have 100,000+ synced photos.
The changes to Recents do only matter for those users who prefer the manual syncing of photos and videos to the syncing with iCloud Photos. The manual syncing has always been somewhat restrictive, because the synced photos are stored separately and cannot be deleted directly on the device. They have been treated as second class item all along.
The upgrade to iOS 18 has made the limitations for manually synced items worse - the new Recents albums do no longer double as a camera roll and the synced albums in in "From My Mac" are having new issues and are no longer visible when trying to share photos to some apps.
None of this is an issue, when we are using iCloud Photos for syncing the photos between or devices - then all photos and albums are equal and there are no longer "second class" manually synced photos complicating things. Photos on iOS 18 has clearly been designed to be used with iCloud Photos for syncing. If you do not want to go down this road, you really need to find a replacement app.
Best photos app replacement for IOS 18
