Photos debacle after 18.1.1 update

Welp I have 30k photos and I’m completely lost in this new iPhoto app. I can’t even find pics I took this morning??? WTAF????

I don’t want all my photos from recents and folders all mixed together. Total mess. This week I look into reversing the update off!!

Thanks for the tips, I’ll look later, but it’s infuriating to change people’s platforms without choice or warning. I’m getting fed up with iPhone which seems back to the old days when they were totalitarian.

In the middle of my livelihood, a project using scads of pics and all of a sudden I have to stop, to relearn everything.

Let’s over complicate the beauty of IPhones simplicity. DISASTER x10. Hundreds of Apple employees had to agree on this chaos… I’m perplexed & fear what simple interface they choose to make un-user-friendly next. Google is sounding like an a realistic option for my next phone. Baffled, for real.

As I understand it, after removing aka "customizing" at the bottom, "All Photos" has no structure at all for easy access to a certain date, so it does not suffice for large curated collections, particularly ones where location, month, day, and a sequence of intentionally related photos have been sorted. I read reviews and blocked the upgrade beyond 17.7.2. My many year set is a research collection as I am sure are others. Search by Day is a critical tool. Recent Day is not useful over time or necessary. Month and Day is not enough. So 18.1.1 Photos is not customizing.

Monuments. Archaeology sites with walls of varied heights (three stones make a wall), metal dig finds sorted by site and location and day (some jewelry, some not), frescoes sorted by city, church, chapel (Italy inserts names down to chapel automatically - is that removed?), sequences of photos from museums with the photo next to the image to retain the information, buildings with a photo of the floor plan and layers of excavated plans, etc.

Consider the citizen scientist. Rare bird report, Great White Shark report, cold stunned turtle, invasive species, report, etc. many of which are sent to the state or federal government. Some photos have legal implications where location, month, date are court references.

Small businesses have portfolios of work. Small towns have working committees whose photos support decisions with financial implications. It goes on.

I have in the past worked in and with photo archives and cannot tell you how important the location and day issue can be.

I just went to the formal Apple product response page with suggestion that I will pay extra for the original (now 17.7.2) version of Photos with Library, All Photos, Years, Months, Days Albums, search, and the sync button. Recently in Europe that sync button was key and still not enough as iCloud access was not 100% even after a successful sync.

Kills me as I had ordered new devices and was set to order more when 18.1.1 hit. Not so sure if I will keep them.

I hope these thoughts prompt others to provide more suggestions than "play with it a bit" with all due respect to Richard.

Why mess with something that was totally fine. Come on Apple do better! Fix this and fix it now! Where did some of my pictures go and this layout is TERRIBLE!

This is an extremely well written and 100% accurate explanation of the problem that many of us are experiencing with Photos in iOS18. Suggestions such as "learn to use the new App" are not helpful, as the problem appears to be that the basic functionality of the App has been completely changed.

I have thoroughly examined all of the options and filters in the new Photos App and have confirmed that there is no way to separate synced photos from snapshots taken on the iPhone. There are all jumbled together in one huge "library" consisting of thousands of thumbnail images. This radical change to the functionality of Photos may work for persons who take and store a few hundred images on their iPhone but has rendered the App completely useless for those of us who take a lot of photos with other cameras and move photos between a Mac and an iPhone for editing, organization, sharing, etc.

Unless and until the prior functionality of the Photos App is restored, the only solution appears to be to use a third-party Camera App for images taken on the the iPhone. I would be interested in learning if anyone has found a better solution to this problem.

Only if you can remember the date you took them - and even then, when you select a date in the library you get a curated view - i.e. not all the pics from that date, just some subset decided by the App.

I took a pic of a wine label sometime in the last couple of years. I've no idea when - not even the month. The way I use the Photos with the old Photos it would have been on the in the first two or three screens of Recents. I might have taken 1000 pics since then, which, in the old phots would not have been in Recents, but in the new one will all appear in the library and I could spend an hour standing in the supermarket scrolling to find the pic of the wine label.

Those of us complaining clearly use Photos very differently from you. I simply don't understand how you can use Photos without a Recents folder, but you can and that's great for you and I'm sure that the new Photos is an upgrade for you and I wouldn't dream of telling you how to use the app. I know that we're stuck with it and I've got a a work-round I can live with, but until you really understand why the loss of Recents is important to a bunch of people then you need to stop suggesting that the current Photos can replicate with a bit of customization and learning it because I don't think it can. If you know a way** to view all the pics that I've taken with the iPhone camera and not downloaded, put in a Mac folder, deleted from the phone and synched back to the phone from Mac then it would be great to hear it.

**The camera roll in the Camera app does it but either as a row of unusefully small icons which cannot be managed or an image at a time, so it's of very limited use.

muguy wrote:

Recents shows items in date added order. In the previous version of photos it would include everything in your library in date added order. You can effect the same sort by dragging your library down until you get the icon to sort (up and down arrows) to sort by recently added or date captured.

As I - and others -have written many times - the old Recents only showed photos which were on the Camera roll in the camera app. i.e. pictures taken with the iphone camera which had not been deleted from the device. It's nothing to do with sorting or arranging or customizing . None of the views in the new Photos displays only what's on the Camera roll.

To help you understand how I use my phone and photos this is what I do. Lets say I take some pics of a dustbin with my phone. Then I take some wedding photos with my phone. I'll need the dustbin pics sometime but I want to add the wedding pics to my IM app on my Mac. I download the wedding pics to my Mac, delete them from my phone, put them in a folder, process them with my IM app to add dates, people, cars, continents, countries, counties, towns, animals, geographical features, hotels, etc. then synch them with my iPhone using Finder. In the old Photos app if I looked in Recents I'd only see the dustbin pics, so when I need them they'll be easily accessible and then I can just delete them. The wedding pics were gone from Recents and they appeared in the "From My Mac" view. That's exactly want I want to see. Today, if I do the same thing then there's no easy way to see just the dustbin pics. Recent Days will contain the wedding pics. The library will contain the wedding pics. Sure, I can get to the iPhone pics eventually, but if I've taken 2000 pics in the last 6 months and I'm looking for one wine label pic taken with the phone and can't remember the month it's a lot of effort for something I used to be able to do with one click. Also, if I only take one pic of the dustbin or wine label then it will never appear in Recent Days because ...well who knows.

The ability to only see pics taken with my phone that are still on my phone but not in the From My Mac section is very important to the way I, and many of the people complaining, use photos. That capability has gone - unless you can tell me how to do it. All the views now include every picture on the phone and don't differentiate between pics taken with the phone and pics synched from my mac. As I've said in an earlier post, I can't comprehend that anyone can use Photos without the functionality that used to exist in Recents. For me it's little better than someone scattering all my photos in a big pile on the floor. It makes Photos just a viewer for me - and a pretty poor one at that. You appear to use Photos very differently from me - which is fine but if you don't understand how I use it I don't see how you can give advice about it. The problems I'm having aren't about sorting or selecting or customizing or learning how the app works.

I know I'm stuck with it and I've got a couple of work arounds for my use-case but you need to stop telling people that the new Photos can do what the old Photos can because it's not true.

I took 7 photos and only 2 showed up. Where did the rest go? So frustrating.

Decided to ‘play with it a bit’ and finally managed to locate some specific pictures I was looking for (don’t ask me how I found them…by luck and a prayer it seemed some sort of grouping magically populated) then, regretfully, I decided to exit the group/day/album (again…not sure where I ended up or how) to cross reference these pics with others I knew I had favorited… and poof! Whatever grouping had populated was gone. Try as I might, I could not find that grouping or get it to re-appear.

WTF?!?! The new photos configuration is ridiculous, random, unintuitive and overall 100% frustrating!!!

How do I undo this part of the update??

Muguy said "And, you can view photos by date in recent days."

Nope. You can only review photos by date in Recent Days if you took 4 or more photos on those days. If you took less than 4 photos on a day then, for some unfathomable reason, that day doesn't appear in the Recent Days collection.

Many of the views are "curated", i.e. the app decides which photos you want to see and only shows you them when you first open the view. In Recent Days, having selected a day, you have to press the button at the bottom, where you can choose to see all pics and remove the Preview. These preferences don't stick, so you have to do it every time you choose the day. Every. Single. Time.

Camera role with search by date is critical to many of us with study collections needed to get a sequence of photos in sequence taken on a single day. Recent Days is irrelevant and useless.

There are standard systems for photo or image search for just such use. The 18.1.1 renders them all impossible for future.

Photos with camera role made creating useful search an open system flexible for many applications that are now jumbled in unusable form.

One thing I am hating is the fact that all photos are not saving to one big library anymore.

Why would anyone want anything saved from insta, snap, WhatsApp to go into a separate little file. For example I edit one pic save it. I’d obviously want it directly next to the original.

It’s impossible to find what I need because now my older pics aren’t downloading quickly from iCloud either. I started to get used to this update but now I just feel really unorganised. It’s stressful. Who on earth thought this was a good idea