iOS 8 Removes Camera Roll
The Camera Roll has disappeared, and in its place is the Recently Added smart album, which collects images you’ve recently taken or added to your device. It joins app-specific and content-specific albums on the Albums page, along with the new Favorites album (more below). Sadly, Apple continues to decline to make a Screenshots smart album (to my own personal disappointment).
Not a HUGE fan of what they did in getting rid of Camera Roll and Photostream! To save free space in iOS 7, I would take pictures and then delete them from my Camera Roll once they synced into Photostream. With the changes in iOS 8, I can no longer tell what’s been synced and what is still on my phone...
This is really confusing. I used to be able to view the Camera Roll from the Camera app, so it was easy to go access recent shots and then go back to taking photos. Now, the Camera app just lets you open the Photos app, showing the recent photos full-sized. If you want to see thumbnails of the recent photos, you have to tap All Photos. But then you are in the Photos app for real, and there’s no button to get back to the camera.
It’s always been necessary to prune the locally stored photos now and then; otherwise they will consume all the space on your phone. Now, there is seemingly no way to see, from the phone, which photos I should be pruning. And there’s still no way to delete a large number of photos without individually tapping them. The Image Capture app on the Mac is needed now more than ever.
Update (2014-09-19): Allyson Kazmucha:
The bottom line is this — the Camera Roll has been nixed in favor of using the Photos tab. Recently Added on the other hand is simply a collection of all your recently taken photos across all your devices. So just think of Recently Added as replacing your personal Photo Stream.
I find it bizarre that there is no way to tell (a) which photos are only stored on the device, (b) which photos were taken with this device, or (c) which photos are on Apple’s server.
Update (2014-09-20): Lukas Mathis:
While this is incredibly annoying to people who know what they’re doing and want to have the ability to manage photos manually, a lot of iPhone owners — perhaps most of them — do not manually manage the photos on their phones, and would not do so if they had the option.
With the current combination of too-low storage capacities and a cloud solution that isn’t there yet, I think having manual controls is the least bad option.
Update (2014-09-22): Ole Begemann:
When you enable iCloud Photo Library on iOS 8, it is no longer possible to delete images from an iPhone using Image Capture on the Mac.
[…] previously noted that iOS 8 removed the Camera Roll. The files from the camera are still stored on the iPhone, but they now appear under Recently […]