Best photos app replacement for IOS 18

I am deeply disappointed with the new design. As an iPhone user for 13 years, with over 200,000 photos stored on my device, this feels like a major letdown. It seems that Apple is increasingly starting to resemble Android, which is a huge step backward in my opinion. A big minus from me.

Feedback goes here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

They promise to read things posted there. They make no such promise about reading things here. I would advise that concrete examples of where you're disappointed with the new design rather than general statements will be most effective.

I agree with not upgrading to IOS 18, I wish I had not upgraded to IOS18. Hopefully a fix will come along soon to allow selected photo folders from iTunes to appear in their corresponding folders on my iPhone..

Does it replicate the old "Recents"? People who are missing Recents don't miss it because it can't find recent pics, they miss it because it used to display only photos taken with the iPhone camera and did not include any pics synched with Mac. This was essential to my workflow and, obviously, many others'.

Also, for those missing pics in Recent Days - the reason is that Recent Days, for some unfathomable reason, only includes days in which 4 or more pictures are taken. However, even if they fix this it still doesn't do what Recents used to.

I just don’t understand IOS 18 photos app. I was just about to order a new larger ipad but I have decided to delay this as the app is just too vague and complicated. The previous version was excellent but I can’t find a way back to it. I used to take a photo , check it in ‘recents’ and edit it. That’s it. Now the photo is not in recently saved and I have to search for it in all the photos. The edit option is now accessed through a random symbol instead of by pressing ‘edit’. Why change it? The AI is very clever but who wants all the irrelevant content it generates. What a shame!

IDK, so far I have just blocked the iOs 18 update and am holding out for any possible fix

I’m not sure about a replacement, but something’s gotta give. I’m a product manager at a software company and I wish I could speak to the PM in charge of the photos app at Apple. I gotta believe he or she isn’t speaking to users regularly and definitely isn't looking at feedback. As a PM I’ve had to shed the thinking that I know better than my users in terms of what they want in our software. Apple still has issues getting rid of this kind of thinking. Please listen to your users Apple and change the Photos app to how it was in iOS 17!

They already tried removing the “camera roll” in the past and so many people spoke out that they brought it back temporarily before changing it to “Recents”. Now they’re trying this. Hopefully they listen one more time. Yall go leave feedback using the link someone provided in this thread!

How do you “sort by recents”?! That doesn’t even make sense grammatically. You either sort by date added or by date created. You can GROUP by recents, but you can’t SORT by recents.

I am so tired of the AI stuff in the Photos app that now I want it back where it was around 2015 or so. At that time I was able to sort my photos as I wanted them, create albums, put photos in the albums, and there was no extra nonsense like 'memories' and 'trips' unless I created them myself.

I have always synced selected Windows photo folders with my

iPhone by putting a tick beside the selected folders in iTunes photos. This no longer

works since I upgraded to IOS 18. Although the folders are still selected in iTunes

they no longer sync as individual folders as they did before the IOS 18 upgrade.

Instead, my selected Windows photo folders now appear in one great mess on my iPhone

11. I can no longer find the folders as before.

My request to Apple is to please correct this situation and allow my selected iTunes photo

folders to appear as photo folders on my iPhone.

I have always used Apple iPhones and was about to upgrade to

iPhone 16. I have never considered Android, however, this disastrous upgrade to

IOS 18 is forcing me to look at an alternative to iPhone.

I’m looking as well. As of now, there really isn’t anything available. I’m did find one app that resurrects a working “Recents” album, but that’s all it does. No editing, no metadata, etc.

[Edited by Moderator]

SuperMarina wrote:

Lightroom is NOT an alternative to Photos! Photos USED TO BE an app that allowed us to view and organize photos. It no longer is.

Lightroom is a photo editing app. Something else entirely. It does not successfully sync albums with my Mac. It also has a lot of extras I do not want which are distracting and time consuming to deal with.

And it is made by Adobe, so cannot be relied on.

Impressive.So much inaccurate information in one post. Well done:

Lightroom is NOT an alternative to Photos!

Yes it is. It sits in exactly the same place in the workflow as Photos does. Like Photos it's a photo manager. Like Photos it has non-destructive processing (just higher quality tools). Like Photos it can share your images across all your devices - the one difference being that it can also share to Windows and Android devices via native applications as well. Anything Photos can do, Lightroom can do too. And then some.

Photos USED TO BE an app that allowed us to view and organize photos. It no longer is.

Nope. Still is. That hasn't changed. The layout may have but the core capabilities of the app haven't changed one iota. And using block capitals and exclamation marks doesn't really help your argument.

Lightroom is a photo editing app. Something else entirely

I wonder if you're confusing Lightroom with Photoshop. No version of Lightroom is an editor like Photoshop. They are all parametric editors, they work in exactly the same way Photos. It's that alternative thing again.

It does not successfully sync albums with my Mac.

Perhaps you need to take the time to learn how to use it, because it certainly does exactly that for other people. I have more than 100k images managed by Lightroom and the organisation of these images is shared across all our devices.

It also has a lot of extras I do not want which are distracting and time consuming to deal with.

Again, I think we're back to the need to take moment or two to learn how to use the app.

And it is made by Adobe, so cannot be relied on.

And among the inaccuracies that is simply the daftest assertion yet. Adobe are the industry leaders in photography management and editing software. There is simply nobody that comes close. They are a huge corporation, whose applications are used world-wide, in professional and amateur settings. Their apps are the yardstick against which all other apps in this field are compared. I can understand that you may not like the applications, I can understand you may have a chip on your shoulder about the company. But there is no question whatever about Adobe's reliability out here in reality.

Any news with regards to a replacement app?

Some of the things that drive crazy.

1. Browsing, it keeps jumping to a different image folder.
2. Duplicating items, places them next to the original when the sole reason was to compile a list that can be looked at, forwarded and again deleted. This is particularly usefull when manually adding image folders to the iphone. Since images are now defaulting by initial date created rather than date added files remain hidden somewhere, just that there are now at least two of those. This can be somewhat remedied by adding files to a new folder, rather than duplicating.
3. I could hand my phone to my 3 year old niece for her to scroll through images, since the update it constantly jumps to the info mode, this is not only frustrating to my niece it is also frustrating to myself.
4. The white border around.
5. The sheer number of useless albums on display.
6. The photo/movie mode.
7. Opening a manually added folder with a large number of images, to get to the most recent images added there is no simple way to scroll to those, fastest being to minimise display scroll to bottom then zoom in again. On the old app you could click a button (album I believe) and would get taken to the most recent image.
8. There is no doubt a few more that don't come to mind. What does come to mind is the constant frustration I experience every time I am using the new app. It's a bloody phone with a tiny screen and doesn't need a million buttons, folders or options.

That's about all for now, if anyone finds a better app that makes it easy to go through images, including manually imported ones shot with different cameras, perhaps for the purpose of posting them to social media that would be really great.

And just for a reference I have 15 manual Photo Folders on my iphone one folder for every year since 2010 containing 14289 images shot with DSLR's, with another folder to be added for 2025 shortly.

In total my phone contains 25160 Photos.

Many thanks

Marcus

marcusbastelphoto

[Edited by Moderator]

SuperMarina wrote: "...the Photos app is now a mess of bad AI features..."

SuperMarina ~ As we're all just users here, let Apple know:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

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