I Hate iOS 18’s Redesigned Photos App: Here’s Why

The redesigned Photos app was undeniably one of the most controversial changes Apple introduced with iOS18. I can’t get the hang of the redesigned interface even though I’ve been using it for a while. These are the flaws that stand out.

1 A cluttered interface

While Apple usually rolls out subtle updates to the Photos app, iOS 18 completely overhauled the app’s interface. Previously, the main screen of the application was divided into the following tabs: Library, For you, albumsand Search.

With iOS 18, Apple ditched the tabbed layout, and the Photos app has now been unified into a single view split into two distinct sections – the main photo grid and Collections. This includes categories like People and Pets and Last Days, straight from the old For You tab.

To access a section, you will need to swipe up or down depending on which section you are currently in.

While this change is meant to reduce the time you spend searching for a picture or video in your gallery, I feel like the Photos app has become more cumbersome. The tabbed layout was much easier to navigate.

For example, I used to easily switch between a photo in my library and a photo in an album without having to scroll up and down. Now if I switch to a specific album and then go back to my library, I lose my place and have to scroll all the way back to where I was. The new single-page layout means your scrolling resets every time you change context.

While some may be a fan of the organizational structure of the all-in-one screen, it’s too cluttered for my taste. While you can clean up the Photos app by customizing the layout to your preferences, the uniform one-page view is here to stay.

2 Pictures and videos are sorted by the date they were taken

Before iOS 18, photos and videos appeared in your library based on when you saved them to the Photos app. When my friends sent me pictures via AirDrop, I noticed that the pictures I received didn’t appear at the end of my timeline like they used to. Instead, they were scattered throughout my older photos based on when they were originally taken, making them much harder to find.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on for days until I realized that the Photos app now sorts pictures by date taken by default. Fortunately, this is an easy fix, but it was one of the main reasons why I wanted to downgrade to iOS 17 for a few days and why I stopped liking the redesigned Photos app.

If you still haven’t figured out how to fix it, all you have to do is browse through your library and tap sorting when the icon appears and select Sort by recently added from the context menu.

3 Video playback is far from perfect

Previously, when you scrolled through videos by dragging your finger along the timeline, a frame preview would appear, giving you a visual indication of where you were in the video. It was a neat way to find specific moments in longer videos without having to watch the whole thing.

Strangely, Apple removed the scrubbing preview feature in the redesigned Photos app.

Now the only way to scrub frame by frame is to use crop tools. Additionally, when you open a video in the gallery, it won’t play full screen by default. You need to tap on it to view it in full screen. The annoying thing is that you can’t scroll through the video when it’s in full screen, which I find quite inconvenient.

Videos also now play on a loop, and there were times when I watched a short video multiple times without realizing it. While these may seem like minor annoyances, they can be really frustrating for anyone who spends a lot of time watching and managing videos in the Photos app.

4 Some albums are difficult to find

As someone with tens of thousands of pictures and videos and a habit of not deleting old photos, I filter pictures that I want to quickly access later or post on social media to my Favorites album.

Before iOS 18, you could find Favorites album by switching to albums table However, after updating to iOS 18, I couldn’t find the Favorites album right away. The same thing happened when I tried to find a screenshot I took, but I couldn’t even find the Screenshots album.

I gave up for a while and used it Search icon at the top to find it. Then I realized that several albums that used to appear in the Albums tab are now under Pinned Collections.

While you can customize your pinned collections, the bottom line is that some albums are still hard to find in the redesigned layout.

In my opinion, the Photos app redesign is a prime example of change for change. I can only hope that Apple makes the interface easier to navigate in future iOS updates.