Redesigned Photos App in iOS 18

macOS 15 upgrade managed to delete my local Photos library. Since I don’t have iCloud Photos enabled on that mac, all local photos are gone now. well.

Federico Viticci:

The Photos app is getting a big redesign in iOS 18 that is surely going to take some time getting used to. The new design revolves around a single-page UI that eschews a tab bar in favor of a split-screen approach with your grid of photos shown at the top, followed by a series of collections that encompass both traditional albums, previous categories such as ‘People and Pets’ and Memories, as well as new sections such as Trips and Recent Days.

The best way to think about this redesign – which I’m sure will be debated a lot this summer – is that everything can now be considered a “collection” that you can pin for quick access to the top of the Photos UI. The top of the interface is still taken up by the regular photo grid (which you can more easily filter for content now), but that part can also be scrolled horizontally to swipe between the grid and other collections. For example, you can swipe from the grid of recents to, say, featured photos, your favorites, or any other collections you want to pin there.

[…]

It’s a lot to take in at once, and this new design can be quite daunting at first. I understand that Apple wants to try a unified design for the Photos app to put a stronger emphasis on rediscovering memories, but I wonder if maybe packing too much information all at once on-screen could be disorienting for less proficient users. The new Photos design almost feels like an exercise in showing off what Apple can build with SwiftUI just because they can; time will tell if users will also appreciate that.

The new Photos interface reminds me of the TV and Music stores, which are among my least favorite Apple designs. I never want to see horizontal scrolling.

Ryan Christoffel:

Photos in iOS 18 now puts all your content on a single screen. Similar to the Journal app introduced last year, the entirety of Photos navigation is done in a single screen that you scroll through to find all your content. That’s it. One screen, scroll up and down, scroll side to side for carousels—everything in the app lives there.

I suppose I should reserve judgement until I try it, but this sounds dreadful.

Juli Clover:

These changes to Photos are in iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia as well as iOS 18.

The Mac version does still have a sidebar.

Benjamin Mayo:

iOS 18 Photos app is weird. It’s like they tried to simplify it, but in reality it is now more complicated. No tab bar means there’s nothing to permanently ground navigation.

Ryan Jones:

iOS 18 Photos app is NOT going to go over well.

Waaaaaaay too little org hierarchy.

iOS 18 Photos == iOS 15 Safari

Steve Troughton-Smith:

If the new Photos app is the new poster child for ‘rewritten in SwiftUI’, hoo-boy…

Previously:

• iOS 18 Announced
• The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop
• Safari 15 Announced

Update (2024-06-18): CTD:

Still very surprising and longstanding omissions in iOS and iPadOS Photos including no support for viewing or adding keywords. No Smart Albums.

Update (2024-07-02): See also: Brandon Butch and Trevor.

Update (2024-07-08): Chance Miller:

Billy Sorrentino, senior director at Apple’s human interface design team, explained the motivation behind this dramatic redesign.

“As our features, users and libraries have grown, so has the density of the [Photos] app. So rather than hunt and peck throughout, we’ve created a simple streamlined single view photos experience based on deep intelligence,” Sorrentino explained. “Ultimately, we wanted to remove friction.”

[…]

“Lots of deep intelligence combined with customization means that Photos can be more personal,” Apple’s Della Huff, manager of the camera and photos product marketing team, explained. “Everyone has a different workflow and so automatic customisation is really key here.”

Emphasis added.

Frank Rausch:

It’s a typical modern UI: You don’t get to form a fitting mental model / cognitive map of how the app is structured and how it works; instead you react to whatever pops up on screen and tap to see what happens.

Mario Guzmán:

This is the current state of app design. And I hate it. Also, what makes it more frustrating is that the old HIG used to have a section on mental models.

But it feels like prominent apps like Photos get redesigned so often that even if you adapt your mental models around the app, you’ll have to re-adapt again shortly because they will be introducing a whole new design soon.

I also hate that it is “Suggestions-first” rather than let me just go to where I need to go to.

Mario Guzmán:

For any designer who has lost their way… here is some information on Metaphors and Mental Models when designing your app’s UX from the original Mac Human Interface Guidelines. I hope this helps.

Federico Viticci (Mastodon):

It’s been a few weeks since I installed iOS 18 on my primary iPhone, and I feel pretty confident in saying this: I was wrong about the new Photos app at first.

I’ll reserve more in-depth comments for the public beta and final release of iOS 18; of course, given the drastic redesign of the app, there’s also a chance Apple may scrap their plans and introduce a safer update with fewer structural changes. However, over the past few weeks, I noticed that not only do I find myself discovering more old photos in iOS 18, but the modular approach of the more customizable Photos app really works for me. I was able to fine-tune the top carousel to my liking, and I customized pinned collections with shortcuts to my favorite sections. Put simply, because of these changes, I use the Photos app a lot more and find navigating it faster than before.

John Gordon:

Things are bad when Apple execs bother to say anything about Photos.app

In my hallucinations the EU forces Apple to make PhotoKit a full platform for third parties to replace Photos.mac with their own product.

Update (2024-07-15): D. Griffin Jones:

With the major Photos app redesign coming in iOS 18, Apple aims for simplicity. However, the version of the Photos app in iOS 18 developer beta 3 is a hodge-podge of design that will confuse users. I think that if Apple doesn’t revise its approach, the company will face significant backlash when it releases the updated app to the public this fall.

Update (2024-07-16): Steve Troughton-Smith:

The new Photos app in iOS 18 just doesn’t do it for me; in fact, I can’t stand the changes they’ve made to the UI and navigation. I am firmly in the camp that feels the photo library is a feature, a utility to be used by other apps. Apple, however, wants Photos to be a destination, a product with a unique UI, flashy features and user retention gimmicks. Whether these two things should be two different apps, I don’t know, but what we’ve got here isn’t an app I want to have my photos in anymore.

It’s worth saying: none of this would be a problem if the Photos app were a user-replaceable component like antitrust regulators in the EU desire. I could just replace the Photos app, which is clearly going off in a direction I want nothing to do with, with an alternative that looks and functions like the old one.

Jason Snell:

I 100% understand the impulse and think it might be forgivable if you could dismiss the other thing and keep it gone, but I can’t get over the whole thing where you launch into the MIDDLE of a scrollable area with different destinations up, down, and (sort of) to the right. It’s bananas.

Machiel:

There is no sense of place. You are lucky if it shows you what you want to see because good luck finding it yourself. Good luck organizing.

There is no way to manage photos properly with this design.

Collin Donnell:

A lot of modern Apple apps on macOS are really lacking in the keyboard shortcuts department. Apple Photos are Freeform are two big ones for me.

Update (2024-07-18): Tuomas Hämäläinen:

One of the things that bothers me about the new Photos app is the heavy emphasis on the system picking a photo or a set of photos to represent a particular collection of items. It makes me feel like I’m not in control, like I might just miss the thing I’m looking for because the system has decided what to highlight and what to downplay. It looks fancy but doesn’t fit the way my brain works. Give me all the items in a regular grid so I can scan visually like I’m used to.

Update (2024-08-07): Steve Troughton-Smith:

I'm really not looking forward to teaching my parents how the new Photos app works and telling them 'no you can’t have the old one back’, ‘no I don't like it either’ 😑

Federico Viticci:

Well, I sure am glad I didn’t pre-write the Safari and Photos chapters of my iOS 18 review.

In today’s iOS 18 beta 5, Safari now comes with a ‘Distraction Control’ feature to hide website elements; Photos’ new design loses the carousel at the top and has other tweaks.

Chance Miller:

One of the big changes to the Photos app in iOS 18 was the addition of a new Carousel view. This view allowed users to swipe left and right to view highlights that updated each day and featured favorite people, pets, places, and more. However, with iOS 18 beta 5, this feature has been removed entirely from the Photos app.

Apple says iOS 18 beta 5 also tweaks the “All Photos” view to display more of the photos grid, without the user having to swipe down. The new “Recent Days” feature also now includes “Recently Saved” content, both of which previously existed separately.

Finally, Apple says that iOS 18 beta 5 adjusts where albums are located for people with multiple albums. The Photos app continues to be fully customizable, and users can rearrange sections and categories as they see fit.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The base level of UI in Photos in iOS 18 beta 5 is a little bit better. But it still has janky scrolling and scroll cancellation that makes it a pain to transition between the grid and what lies beneath. Scroll up and down and watch it rubberband and stutter and glitch about to see what I mean. Navigate a level deeper into anything and it’s just as bad as before, though. It’s even more awful than I would have expected a SwiftUI rewrite of a major system app to be, and my expectations are low.

Previously:

• Sonos Apologizes for App Redesign
• Books for iPad Gets the Photos Treatment
• macOS 15 Sequoia Public Beta

Update (2024-08-14): Juli Clover:

This guide aggregates everything different with the iOS 18 Photos app, and it is up to date with Apple’s latest changes.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Photos in iOS 18b6 has improved to ‘unpleasant, but tolerable’, at least once you turn off basically everything. I don’t like the scrolling main screen, and I don’t like that albums dismiss on scroll, but you can turn off enough of it now to make it work

Update (2024-09-12): Justin Bianco:

I’ve been using iOS 18 for a few weeks now and the Photos app is interesting but scrolling is a joke. I constantly dismiss an album when I’m trying to scroll through it, if I scroll too far sometimes I get an auto playing slideshow movie, and the whole thing feels like using an over-designed, scroll-jacked website. Navigation just doesn’t feel linear or hierarchical anymore and I hate it.

Mario Guzmán:

Everything about this post is what I experience too. I’m constantly accidentally exiting out of an album because my finger meaning to scroll vertically is slightly slanted and takes it as a horizontal swipe. This is by far the most frustrating Photos app.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I really hope Apple has learned something useful by rewriting Photos in SwiftUI, but I would still go back to the old app in a heartbeat

Update (2024-09-17): Jason Snell:

I’ve spent the summer working on a new edition of my book about Photos and so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what Apple’s trying to do here.

[…]

So the new version of Photos doesn’t launch to the Library view, with a bunch of tabs at the bottom that apparently few people clicked on. Instead, it launches to a new hybrid view (thankfully simplified and tweaked since the original iOS beta earlier this summer) that displays the familiar Library grid in the top two-thirds of the screen, with a series of Collections in the bottom third. When you scroll up, you’re in classic Library view. When you scroll down, you’re seeing the multitude of ways that Photos can automatically carve up and re-serve you the contents of your Library in ways that make sense and are pleasing.

I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.

[…]

The Mac is updated too, but there’s no real interface overhaul—you can get to Collections via the Sidebar, as always.

Update (2024-09-20): Dan Moren:

The redesign has taken some time to get used to, but after a few months with it I’ve found I really do appreciate the changes for the most part.

Federico Viticci:

I was wrong about the new Photos at first. Having used iOS 18’s Photos app every day since June, not only do I think Apple managed to invent a new design paradigm for SwiftUI-based, library-centric apps on iOS, but they’ve also created an app that is going to help people rediscover old memories more effectively and serendipitously than before.

Update (2024-09-25): Scott Hanselman:

The new ios18 photos app is just awful. Does exactly the opposite of everything I need it to do in the most unintuitive way possible.

John Gordon:

iOS 18: took me 20 minutes of use to crash Photos.app on iOS 18.0

[…]

Looks like iOS 18 photos can’t handle large numbers of albums. Apple needs to pay me to test their crap.

Tim Hardwick:

While this new layout aims to streamline navigation, you may want to tailor it to your preferences. Here's how you can customize and reorder collections in the new Photos app.

Dave Mark:

I am constantly confused by the new Photos app layout. Years and years of muscle memory thrown to the wayside.

This article really helps, PLUS it’s good to know how to customize the layout.

Update (2024-11-11): Marcin Krzyzanowski:

my iPad has almost 20 cm width, yet all buttons are crumbled in a corner with 1mm space between them, with spaces that makes it impossible to touch the right button with human sized fingers

Update (2024-12-05): Tanner Bennett:

There used to be a private setting to revert the photos app back to how it looked before iOS 18. I hope Apple is seeing all this feedback and makes that setting public. This is worse than the Safari redesign by far.

Update (2024-12-06): Matt Growcoot (via Ric Ford):

While users can’t take their Photo app back to the iOS 17 way of doing things, there is a way of changing it on iOS 18.

Design iOS iOS 18 iPadOS iPadOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Photos.app SwiftUI

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