As you know for the slightly more serious photographer, the photos app on IOS 18 was destroyed. Its ability to see the Recent (Camera Roll) photos as an album was removed. This was an essential feature and now that it's gone the Photos app is useless. What is the best replacement? A replacement app should be able to view albums and treat Camera Roll as a independent album. Advice is appreciated. Thanks.
iPhone 15 Pro Max, 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.
HashPhotos. (I don't work for them.) I like this app better.
Scroll to the bottom of the Library view and you'll see a section called 'Recent Days', which is recents, broken into day views. You can even re-order these items so that Recent days is the first you reach, and of course, when you quit the app it reopens at the same point.
As for alternatives the best I've ever used was Adobe's Lightroom CC.
If you're looking for an alternative to Photos then check out Adobe's Lightroom CC - everything that Photos has, plus a lot more - and yes it's not called recents but you can find all your recent photos easily.
I assume with "recents" you mean Camera Roll. The actual Recents blends in with the Library when a photo's date overlaps with synched photos from other devices. Camera Roll is unique to the camera device -- it is immensely valuable -- and Apple got rid of it. You can try googling IOS Camera Roll and minor things like Photo Swipe will turn up.
I mainly use actual cameras to take photos; it is extremely rare for me to even use the camera on my iPad. That is not how I operate.
My primary motivation for buying an iPad in the first place was to use it for photography purposes; storing and displaying my photos!
This used to work really well, but it no longer does because the Photos app is now a mess of bad AI features. There may exist some people who like those, but I am quite sure serious photographers don't.
I hate it so much I may get rid of both my iPhone and iPad because of it. The Mac still works but I'm starting to get tired of Apple's overbearing attitude towards users.
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.
Tried it. May be better than the current Photos app, but not by much. It still favors its own 'AI' features over what the user wants, albums are cluttered with unwanted data which cannot be turned off, and it is not near as simple to navigate as the earlier versions of Photos.
But I may keep it around for a while since it may help me find the photos I want to view better than the lengthy search process in Photos.
I hated the new design, but noticed that you can modify the layout quite a bit by scrolling down and choosing customize and re-order, which allows you to reorder, or complete hide entire sections as well. Once I figured that out, it's a lot easier because I don't use most of the crap in there and just turned off what I don't want, and it's back to acceptable.
I don't understand your comment about the bad photo gallery on Android when, for example, Samsung's Photo Gallery is far more clear and, more importantly, it dumps photos into precise folders so I don't have to search for photos in 'all photos' like in the hideous IOS gallery.
You don't have to manually browse through your photos, you can do a keyword search of things within a photo, for example, if you're looking for that photo of you and your friend standing by the fireplace, you can simply search the word fireplace, and it will find the photo for you. You can keyword search just about anything, car, fire, book, receipt, not to mention text searches too. In other words, if you have a picture of text, you can search that text too.
Could you PLEASE read the question before twaddling on for miles and miles?
I specifically stated that Lightroom is NOT a replacement for Photos. It is not. Just look it up. I have used Lightroom in the past, it is not what I want and I am not going to pretend it is and I am not going to bother using it again. It does not do what I want done!
All I want is my albums, I do not want a bunch of extras with them. Photos was already cluttered enough and now it cut the albums out.
Could you please bother reading the question before commenting?
Yes, we all know Android 'dumps' photos into folders according to some algorithm or other. Photos does the same, and have done for a long time, in addition to the 'all photos' which at least used to allow users to see their photos.
What was removed that people are angry about was the ability to sync Albums the USER create between multiple devices over multiple updates and SEE those albums, as albums, on the phone. This used to be an option in Photos (but never on any Android I have ever seen) but it no longer is. For those of us who use actual cameras and not only the little toy one on the phone, this is actually useful, and in some cases important.
We want it back! We do not want any 'AI' or algorithms making 'smart albums' because that is already there, and many do not find it even slightly useful.
You know, many of the iPhone users out there actively chose the iPhone because it has features useful to us that Android lacks. This is one of those features, but don't worry about it since you apparently aren't familiar with it.
Joseph ~ Consider the free Darkroom app which opens into Recents. And it offers several Shortcuts actions — I use this one to quickly saturate screenshots:
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What’s the app??
That is probably why that mass of photos appears in a random order regardless of how you press that Sort button.
Best photos app replacement for IOS 18
