You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

iOS 18.0.1 Update Ruined Photos App

I just recently updated my iPhone 15 pro to the latest iOS 18.0.1), and it has made the photos app dysfunctional and entirely unusable. I use my photos app every day and heavily rely on quick, easy access through visual organization for my many folders and albums. But the new update has alienated me from my own photos I’ve spent countless hours organizing.


This update not only removed the focus on albums, but I can’t even navigate through this new layout at all. I honestly can’t use the app as it is now. I used to be able to find any of my photos within seconds, but now I can’t find them at all if they aren’t recently added items.


There are certainly new features that are helpful in some aspects for other customers. I know the customize and reorder settings is at the bottom to make things “easier” for some, but it doesn’t change the fact I can’t navigate my own photos I’ve had for years. As a user who primarily organizes photos with albums and folders, the added features such as recent days, trips, and memories are useless to me. And I know I can deselect these categories from showing personally, but that still doesn’t change the fact the albums and folders have been altered in a way that is uniformly inefficient and confusing.


I’m asking if there’s way to revert back to the old format or at least change the format/look of the albums like they used to be: enlarged icons in groups of four. A vertical list of tiny icons and names is useless to me. Period.


I genuinely don’t know what to do because this update has ruined my ability to use and navigate the app. I’ve played around with all the new settings but I can’t find a way to fix the album and folder layout to be functional again.



-The one thing that has kept me as an Apple customer is the easy and visually clean user interface. But the drastic change in the way the photo app functions and the inability to return to what has worked for me for years, makes me question future purchases with Apple products if this issue is left unresolved with future iOS.


iPhone 15 Pro

Posted on Oct 21, 2024 2:40 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 26, 2024 11:16 AM

I am shocked that Apple assumes the right to destroy how I organize my pics. Any news on Apple providing a simple fix to allow me to get Ai out of “organizing” my photos and returning to my previous set up?



10 replies

Oct 27, 2024 6:06 AM in response to cewharton14

I’m about to get an old iPhone and get rid of my brand new one because of this new Photos app that completely destroyed my ability to find any photos I was looking for. Where’s my favorites? Where’s my recently deleted? Where’s everything?

I had my photo folders organized in the order I wanted them in and now they are re-organized by date. So now I can’t find anything

Oct 26, 2024 1:41 PM in response to MiloB4

You can scroll to the bottom and tic off everything there and it's almost like ti was but not quite. They've made photos look like some kind of social media. I'm not enamored with the way every tech company is Rushing to get AI involved in every aspect of what they do either. I find great value in unpredictability and randomness to help me fumble onto things by mistake that amore direct search or function might over look.

Oct 22, 2024 2:12 PM in response to cewharton14

I can't even see my phots on my iMac anymore. All the icons are greyed out now. I have to do things the old fashioned way and got to iCloud online and download the photos and then work on each one individually in my phot editor-GIMP, and then put them away where I want them one at a time which takes a lot more time. My interface looks like this now.

Nov 22, 2024 12:21 AM in response to muguy

You can’t customise. Stop using the word customise. Customise means that I can choose how I enter and organise the content. This IOS 18 photos app takes all my control away. It chooses what goes into the “categories” so I have no control over it whatsoever. Apple please revert back to the old layout or at least give us the option to do so.

Nov 14, 2024 5:42 AM in response to cewharton14

My problem with the app isn't so much organization although? I can see why people who use their phones for editing and organizing photos would be upset. People don't need some /ai feature telling then]m that what they're seeing is their vacation, or anything else. The person with the phone knows what's what. They took the pictures.

My problem is it won't recognize new pictures I take in photos on the iMac. The tab on the top left says the name of the phone. It used to be a simple process to click that tab and all your picture showed up with the new ones on the right of a divider with only a few older ones on the left. Now, brings old photos into the screen and calls them new and mixes them up and doesn't render all the new ones and some days doesn't render any photos at all. I sometimes get a page full of greyed out icons. It used to be the new pictures showed up in the order they were taken by the day and all you had to do is click on download all new photos and bam everything you hadn't already downloaded came in on a new screen with no old pictures included and I could edit all of them right in photos and then put them all away on the computer by date, names or both I gave the folders I create. It was a perfect system. Now, it's a mess and often times none of the new photos are there. I've resorted to the old way of doing things. I have to go online to iCloud and download all the new pictures into my downloads folder and work on each picture individually in my photo app-Gimp, one at a time and save them. It wastes a huge amount of time and it's clumsy to say the least. I really hope this gets fixed in the next update.

Nov 22, 2024 1:41 AM in response to muguy

muguy wrote:

You cannot revert but you can edit your main page display by using the customize button at the bottom if say, you wish to have your albums display on top. Otherwise, photos. is substantially similar to before.

I wish it really were "substantially similar to before", but we cannot bring the missing items back.


There is no sufficient replacement for the "Days" for example, we are only having a few curated "recent days" as a new day view, with many photos left out. And that is not sufficient to manage a large photos library with 70000 photos or more. When I want to work with the photos from a few years ago, it is nearly impossible to access a certain day in the past. The Years and Months are only showing a curated collection, and the day I am looking for is frequently missing. And the Days tab is gone. We have to go directly to "All Photos" from the Month and drown in an endless stream of 70000 photos with no separation between the days. I now have to recreate the structure I had in iPhoto and Aperture for many years: Nested folders for the Years and Months with an album for each day. I create these folders on my Mac using smart albums for the days, as the Day tab is gone from Photos for Mac as well. The Moments or Days have been one of the most useful time-saving features of Photos.

Even the search for certain date will not find the photos or videos taken on that day, as we now can only search for a month or a year, but will find an album with date as a part of the album name or a memory with that date.


It is now easier to hide the collections we do not need, which is great, but we are left basically with only the "curated" collections, that do not help much, when we want to manage our photos, tag them, or weed out redundant photos. Then we need an easy access to all photos taken at a certain day. "All Photos" is now the only view, where we can see all our photos, not curated. But "All Photos" has no structure at all for easy access to a certain date, so it does not suffice, when we have a relatively large library to manage and still have to organize last years photos.


Nov 22, 2024 5:48 AM in response to Kevinkovack

Seems like spending more money is every company's answer to a problem they create these days. There do seem to be a huge number of complaints about this so called update in photos all over the internet but so far nothing but crickets from apple, no improvements, updates or even any comments. This has opened my eyes to one thing though. I had no idea how many people manipulate and arrange their photos right on the phone. I never do that. The pictures and icons are so small and I have carpenter fingers so If I tried to do that I'd make a mess of everything, plus, there's lots of times I've had what looked like good pictures or movies I took on my phone and then look at them on my computer and they're terrible once they're blown up into life sized images. Sometimes they're pixelated and out of focus. On the phone the data is so compressed even bad photos sometimes look good. All of this is why I'm looking to get a used but decent digital camera with interchangeable lenses. Phones are a great convenience and not bulky to carry around but I've reached my limit of patience with mine. Things are just too small and hard to see on it. That's true for all phones not just the iPhone.

iOS 18.0.1 Update Ruined Photos App

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.