Any way in Photos to recreate the old “Camera Roll” functionality?
The “Camera Roll” functionality disappeared in iOS some time ago but its absence is a real pain. Is there any way to recreate it, via a Smart Album or similar?
What I need is an album which only contains photos which have a “garbage bin” icon hence can be deleted directly from my iPhone using the Photos App.
Now why do I need this functionality?
- My iPhone has thousands of photos stored on it, but the vast majority of those are in curated albums I created on my Mac (often using photos from multiple cameras and sources) and then synced back to my iPhone. But often I only want to look at photos that meet these criteria:
- Physically stored on my iPhone (not iCloud)
- Are not in any album synced back from my Mac
- And can be deleted from my iPhone
That’s because photos that meet those criteria are usually my ‘aide memoire’ photos. Photos of random stuff used as prompters, temporary records of things, or photos that I have not yet curated into an album.
Quite often they are photos which I want to delete once they have served their purpose. They will never go into any album. There might only be 20-30 of them on my phone at any one time.
But now, without a Camera Roll, there is no way to easily skim through such photos - because they are now mixed in with every other photo on my phone - thousands of them - and no way, apparently, to filter them out.
These work-around don’t work:
- Searching for photos taken by my iPhone will show all photos taken by my iPhone, including those that have been curated into an album on my Mac and synced back. These photos cannot be deleted from my phone. They can only be deleted from my Mac and then resyncing. That’s fine, because that’s the way I want it to work. But it means my deletable photos are all mixed up with these and not easily identified without exhaustively reviewing Every. Single. Photo.
- Recent Days photos has exactly the same problem. Aide Memoire photos are mixed in with albums recently curated and synced back from my Mac. And sometimes Aide Memoire photos might be months or years old - so don’t appear here.
Now this is not mission impossible because Photos already knows which photos meet these criteria:
- Photos that are synced back from my Mac cannot be deleted within the Photos app. No garbage bin icon will appear when viewing such photos.
- Photos taken on my iPhone, stored on my iPhone, and are not in an album synced from my Mac have a garbage bin icon and can be deleted.
So with Cameral Roll gone, how do I create an album on my iPhone that only shows deletable photos?
iPhone 14 Pro