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Can’t search photo albums in iOS 18

After upgraded to iOS 18, I found that search function was missing for Photo Albums. And the search function in iOS 18 Photos wasn’t able to search for the Photo album name. How to resolve this ?

Posted on Sep 17, 2024 5:03 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 19, 2024 4:50 PM

It’s pretty clear that Apple hired 10-year-old to write iOS 18 and they didn’t test anything. as a longtime iPhone user, I will say without any hesitation whatsoever that this is the absolute worst version of iOS to have ever been released.

64 replies

Oct 26, 2024 1:44 AM in response to Richard.Taylor

For me, the search for albums, is not broken, just sometimes very, very slow.

When I am searching for an album by name, I now have to type the complete name of the album into the search field, otherwise it will not be found instantly. That is cumbersome, as my album names are long and descriptive and it is a lot of typing, and I have to remember the full name.


For example, I can find the album "2024_10_11_Provence_Tag_06_Luberon" quickly, when I enter the full name into the search, but not, when I enter just the start of the album name. When I just search for "2024_10" I have to wait for a quarter of an hour, until I am seeing a list of all album names starting with this prefix, and I have to tap the button "Show All", or I will only be seeing some of the 14 collections as a search results.


My library is not very large, just 70000 items, and it is not using "Optimize iPhone Storage", all photos and videos have been downloaded in full to the iPhone, so the search could be faster, like before.


Nov 10, 2024 5:55 PM in response to DDContact

CORRECTION:

It appears the "Search" function is available, but only when you're looking at the default (Home page) of the photos app (all your photos).


But if you try to add a selected photo or photos to an album there's no "search" or "alphabetical order" option to find the album (you have to scroll through every album to add that photo??) NOT User friendly or innovative.

Nov 10, 2024 6:00 PM in response to wyatt_wong

CORRECTION:

It appears the "Search" function is available, but only when you're looking at the default (Home page) of the photos app (all your photos).


But if you try to add a selected photo or photos to an album there's no "search" or "alphabetical order" option to find the album (you have to scroll through every album to add that photo??)

NOT User friendly or innovative. A needed option.


Sep 22, 2024 6:49 AM in response to _merigan

_merigan wrote: … Things like “plants” “pizza” “guitars” and a persons name it shows me on average 0 or at most 28 when I have hundreds that use to come up on any prior OS.

Again, I don't think that it's the iOS. All those things work for me on iOS 18. It's not a bad idea to revert to an earlier OS and see if it makes a difference. Let us know…

Oct 12, 2024 3:27 PM in response to patticake112

I have about three thousand albums, many left over from iPhoto-created Events that I later gave meaningful names. Counting private and shared libraries, I have over a hundred thousand photos and a few videos.


Three weeks after moving the library onto my iPhone 16 with iOS 18, many (but not all) of my albums can be located by name with the search function. My MacBook Pro running Sequoia finds approximately the same number of folders per search, but not necessarily the same ones.


Seems the newest Photos library search engine can take an inordinate amount of time to build the tables necessary to locate things.

Can’t search photo albums in iOS 18

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