IOS 18 Photos Library is a disaster

The new photos app is just awful.

It's actually un-useable. Urge people to not update, I literally can't find anything anymore - and the video and photo viewing is terrible. You can't scrub videos anymore, and you have to leave the video to move ahead when previewing. It's garbage, so much so that I've moved all my photos into Adobe.

It’s awful. I feel like most of the big changes in photos have made things worse seldom better. Like they change things just to change them. Its really annoying

It is akin to Microsoft Outlook on the desktop, which is unnecessarily complicated, and entirely too much going on. You can’t find a photo you’re looking for. When you’re looking for a person which can be helpful, great, but then it starts up on some video of photos that you didn’t ask them to play. I wish they would just stop trying to make everything more complicated. The rest of us do not care. If you’re not in the tech biz, you simply don’t care you just want to see and locate your photo.

When you edit a synced photo on your iPhone, a copy will be saved to Photos, because we can only edit photos in Photos, that have been saved to Photos.

You would not have these problems with the difference between synced photos and saved photos, if you switched from manual syncing to syncing with iCloud Photos. Photos has been designed to be used with iCloud Photos across all your devices. I know, not all users like to use iCloud, but it the only easy and convenient way to work with Photos across your devices.

The new user interface in Photos on iOS 18 is somewhat cluttered with too many items hogging the limited space on the display, but there is one advantage, compared to the iOS 17 version. We can hide many of the collections we do not want to use and pin the the ones that we need most frequently for easy access.

You may want to have a look at this page in the user guide: Customize the Photos app on iPhone - Apple Support

Photos on iOS 18 does not have a fixed layout of the albums and collection. You can freely configure, which collections will be shown or hidden. The Recently Deleted album is a part of the "Others" collection.

1. Go to the Photos app  on your iPhone.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the app, then tap Customize & Reorder.

Absolute disaster for me too. It is importing some pictures but not others. I have a brand new iPhone and the first sync into the fresh phone only put some 10000 out of 25000 photos in the library and not even the ones I had imported the same day into the library. It is absolute chaos.

What is that? My whole photo life is in complete disarray.

As I have not been using the manual syncing on iOS 18 I cannot help with this. I am using a smaller Photos Library just for syncing with iCloud. The complete archive of all my photos is stored locally on my Mac. All photos I want on my iPhone and iPad are in small library for iCloud syncing. You could create a small library that will not need an additional iCloud Storage plan.

It's confusing and inconvenient. I use my phone primarily for picture taking and content and this update is making me consider switching from apple. It's unusable. I'm hoping Apple hears us and gets rid of it promptly.

The photo library is too big for icloud and I refuse to pay more. Manual sync should work.

the point is that thousands of photos in my library do not show up on my iPhone. It follows no logic that I can see.

Apple doesn't read here in this user-to-user forum for feedback or suggestions. You can, however, let them know your thoughts here:

Product Feedback - Apple

Some of us really like the new Photos.