Apple gave the Photos app an iOS 18 makeover, and it's a disaster

Summary

Apple’s iOS 18 update brought overwhelming changes to the Apple Photos app layout.
Many users find the new customization options, like “Recent Days” and “Featured Photos,” confusing.
The massive restructuring made navigating the photo grid and accessing albums more challenging.

Dealing with change is hard, but having that change forced upon you is even harder. This is something that happens all the time with your technology, but oftentimes, a big change is something that you can avoid dealing with, such as not purchasing the new version of the device you love. If you aren’t a huge fan of the latest laptop, keep yours for a little while longer.

When it is the software that changes for, say, your iPhone, you usually have to pay full attention to be in the know about what those changes will be. You probably don’t even realize until the next day that your phone was going to update overnight, and you wake up to some new features you knew nothing about. That happened with the complete redesign of the Apple Photos app — it went through a massive restructuring in the iOS 18 update.

Does the new iOS 18 photos app make you want to scream?

I typically only use my phone as a tool — it makes phone calls, checks emails, and it’s a place where I can reply to Slacks and keep in touch with friends and family over text. Occasionally, I break out the social media apps for some doom-scrolling, but I don’t have games. All that said, I’m pretty cognizant of my screen-time. The one thing I do enjoy using my iPhone for is taking pictures and looking back on them. After I updated to iOS 18, this is no longer an enjoyable experience for me. Why is the app so overly complicated now? It feels overwhelming and clunky, but maybe I’m sounding a bit like a boomer complaining about a silly app? Does anyone else feel this way or have I turned into my grandmother?

To say it changed is an understatement. The entire layout is different. There are many more ways of customizing your photos. While some of the features are helpful, such as being able to reorganize the album how you prefer, there are a lot of changes that are too overwhelming. Here’s more on why the new Apple Photos update made the app worse to use.

Your changes have been saved

Apple Photos

Photos is a native Apple app for users to store media such as pictures, videos, live images, gifs, and more on their iOS devices.

It’s flat out overwhelming

Too many changes all at once, Apple

Previously, the Apple Photos app would show you your photos in a grid style format that allowed you to scroll through your photos or pinpoint an approximate month that they were taken in to find one. People can deal with some small changes, but forcing an entirely new layout with so many new features on everyone is a whole other story. Not saying that people won’t adapt to it because, well, we’ll be forced to, but all these changes at once will make people dread opening up the app in the first place.

Now, when you do open the app, you’re met with a bombardment of images, videos, menus, all in a massive grid without much alert as to what the changes are. The ability to customize your grid and library is great, but actually having to set it up is incredibly difficult and can be time-consuming. It’s almost like Apple just assumes you’re going to leave it, even among all the complaints.

How to make iOS 18’s head scratching new Photos app less confusing

Users have been complaining about iOS 18’s confusing new Photos layout — here’s how to customize it so it’s less daunting to use.

When you do open the app, you’re met with a bombardment of images, videos, menus, all in a massive grid without much alert as to what the changes even are.

Not every photo shows up in Months

Why would I only care about a handful of pictures?

You can view the photos in your Photo app by just scrolling upward through all the pictures. But, if you’re someone who takes a lot of pictures, you probably don’t want to have to scroll through thousands of pictures. If you know approximately when you took the photo that you’re looking for, you can scroll and select month or year as the filter option. In previous iterations of the Photos app, if you’re searching by month, it would present you with a number of photos from that period.

But with the latest version, you get four. The odds that your photo is in those four, especially if you take a lot of photos, are slim at best. Not only does the app make you click into one of those photos to see other ones from the month, but you then have to scroll left or right to see the photos. Rather than showing you a thumbnail in the grid, it makes you do more so much work than necessary. I really can’t figure out why it only gives you only four photos, as it clearly has the ability to show you all the photos from a given month.

Apple Photos tips and tricks: Storing, editing and sharing your iPhone photos

This feature guides you through how to get the most out of the Apple Photos on your iPhone, including all the tips and tricks we have found.

Recent Days? Who is this for?

Just scroll like a normal human

Under your photo grid, there’s a section that says Recent Days. It’s a filter of sorts, similar to Months and Years. If you tap the words Recent Days, a menu pops up where you can click into a gallery of photos for different days all the way back to the beginning of your album. If you don’t tap the words Recent Days, you can see about 16 different icons for different days leading back about 16 days worth of photos.

What I don’t understand is, who is using Recent Days? If you actually want to see a photo or video from recent days, the photo grid is right above it. You can easily just scroll until you find the photo you want. 16 days worth of options is not that many to scroll through — if it’s a truly “recent” photo that you’re looking for, it won’t be very far from where you start. If you are going back quite a ways, the Months and Years filters are much more suited for your further back filtering.

Customization issues for anyone

Who actually picks the Featured Photos?

As mentioned, you are able to customize what you actually see besides the photo grid. There are now many new options and features in the app that previously were not there.

The new list is:

Recent Days
People & Pets
Pinned Collections
Shared Albums
Memories
Trips
Featured Photos
Media Types
Utilities
Albums
Wallpaper Suggestions

You can move the placement of these, reordering them as you see fit. You can also toggle them on or off, so you can eliminate them if you don’t like them.

Apple just made a big move to directly challenge Photoshop

Apple is acquiring the Lithuanian company Pixelmator, which has image editing apps similar to Photoshop.

While I enjoy seeing photos of my dog, the People & Pets and Wallpaper Suggestions feature is one that I got rid of immediately. Utilities is only useful to me because it has favorited photos, which I frequently use. But I can add that as a Pinned Collection, making Utilities expendable.

What I can’t figure out is what Featured Photos is. Does Apple decide what photos I want to be featured? Does it just use what they think I’d like and make them a suggestion? I don’t need another look at random photos in my camera roll. I will admit that I do love the Memories videos and always have. Media type has a place because it shows the breakdown of videos, Live photos, and more, but the rest all just seem like added walks down memory lane and I only need so many of those. There’s just too much here, and I happily edited it down.