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
Scroll to the bottom of the Library view and you'll see a section called 'Recent Days', which is recents, broken into day views. You can even re-order these items so that Recent days is the first you reach, and of course, when you quit the app it reopens at the same point.
As for alternatives the best I've ever used was Adobe's Lightroom CC.
Joseph ~ Consider the free Darkroom app which opens into Recents. And it offers several Shortcuts actions — I use this one to quickly saturate screenshots:
õ¿õ¬
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.
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.
If you're looking for an alternative to Photos then check out Adobe's Lightroom CC - everything that Photos has, plus a lot more - and yes it's not called recents but you can find all your recent photos easily.
There is no replacement app available.
Yes there is. Adobe's Lightroom CC is more than a match for Photos in just about every aspect. Have you evaluated it? And there are others.
HashPhotos. (I don't work for them.) I like this app better.
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.
No iOS app available? What on earth is this?
https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/lightroom-photo-editor/id878783582
or here
https://www.adobe.com/ie/products/photoshop-lightroom/mobile.html
Or what is that app on my iPhone and iPad? Gee I dunno. Is that it on my AppleTV too?
Further I'm not telling anyone to use it. I was asked to name an alternative. I did.
I assume with "recents" you mean Camera Roll. The actual Recents blends in with the Library when a photo's date overlaps with synched photos from other devices. Camera Roll is unique to the camera device -- it is immensely valuable -- and Apple got rid of it. You can try googling IOS Camera Roll and minor things like Photo Swipe will turn up.
Joseph Www wrote:…Its ability to see the Recent (Camera Roll) photos as an album was removed.
Of course, you could just sort the Library by Recents.
Seems just as good as Recents to me…
HashPhotos may be the closest yet, but not quite there!
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!
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.
There is no replacement app available. Basically it matters to everybody that's the whole point of the complaints here. The Yer man suggestions do not help the complaints as they are written.
Best photos app replacement for IOS 18
