There is a good rule: do not touch what works fine. Apple forgot about it, and here is the result.
iOS 18 has a major update to the app Photo – the only built-in way to interact with photos on your iPhone, and your entire iCloud library of photos, videos, and screenshots. There have been very few complaints about it so far, except that I would like more convenient cataloging.
Here are the top 42 new features of iOS 18
In response to this, Apple went where no one asked it to go: it turned the application into something between a social media feed and an AI designer concept – with non-obvious algorithms, hundreds of tabs, different submenus and a bunch of settings that work incomprehensibly.
I’ve been installing and occasionally reviewing iOS betas for over 13 years, and I don’t remember so an aggressive, controversial change to a key application.
Now that everyone can install the iOS 18 public beta, I want to ask. Am I the only one who is stressed about the update? Photowhich have now become much more difficult to understand and no easier to find anything?
What’s wrong with the Photos app
The new home screen of the Photos app in iOS 18. On the surface, everything looks pretty normal.
Application Photo changed smoothly over the years. Despite the advent of albums, tabs, sections and neuro-«Memories“, the idea of showing a full feed of all images on the home screen remained untouched. If you last used an iPhone 10 years ago, then Photos from iOS 17 would be easy to figure out in less than a minute.
What happened to photos in iOS 18? In simple terms, Apple got rid of the division of the feed into tabs, like Recentcombining all of this into one common, deeply customizable feed. Now it has everything: all your albums, all Memoriesall sections, videos and so on.
Sounds good? It even looks interesting in the picture. Until you start using it.
There are a lot of sections, their content is not intuitive.
▸ Overloading sections. Sections are available under the top photo feed. By default, everything is included, that is:
recent days
people
pinned collections
memories
trips
albums
shared albums
photo selection
media file types
other
wallpaper offers
You will scroll for a long time to the very end, and even longer to find what you need from these items. It’s good that you can remove unnecessary ones if you scroll to the end and click on Tune.
Subsections Pinned collections can duplicate each other and even display the same photo.
▸ The sections contain who knows what. The names of each item in the sections themselves are not very clear. What is Othercan you guess? Drum roll…
These are hidden photos, duplicates, recently deleted photos, and subsections. Checks and Documentation. It’s not intuitive, you have to remember it all.
What about Pinned collections? Here you can add the same sections that are already in the main list of the page, as well as additional ones that for some reason cannot be installed from this list. Yes, you can duplicate (why?).
I will also add to this that in the section Memories displays selections of photos of both people and trips. And in the section Trips – only trips. At the same time, both sections can be moved to the main page for some reason, so that their content repeats each other in the feed. My head is spinning.
▸ Each section has different internal pages.. Superficially, the idea here is clear: the interface inside the section is made according to the content of this section. For example, if you open Tripsthen at the top in the bookmarks you can select a specific year, and in the large cards that scroll vertically – find a selection of photos from a specific “trip”. If you have a lot of trips, get ready to scroll heartily.
At the same time, Memories there is no sensible filtering. And People a completely different interface altogether. In short, each screen looks different from the previous one or the similar one in the neighboring section.
The interface is different everywhere.
▸ 100500 different interfaces. Just look at the screenshots above. A cross here and there. Some sections and subsections can be closed by swiping down, others cannot. Some have buttons over the photos, some don’t. Some photos are presented as a collage, some don’t…
This is not a single interface language, but a dump of ideas united by almost nothing. As if the designer had the task of showing the maximum of the most diverse representations of content within the program, and it did not matter how the user would learn all this.
▸ Photos flash before my eyes. Each horizontally scrolling section holds at least 5 photos, often in blocks of several at once. They are not static, but change almost every second. There can be up to five such slideshows on one screen at once.
As soon as you start scrolling, a disco of constantly changing photos begins before your eyes. Not only does it look terrible, but you don’t even have time to look at some of them, they are replaced by the next photo so quickly. It’s unclear what purpose this flickering serves, other than visualization for an Apple presentation. And there is no benefit for the user at all.
Three swipes to the side, and the feed of all photos disappeared from the main page completely.
▸ They ruined the most important thing – the feed of all photos. If you don’t scroll down and drown in a soup of 125 incompatible designer ideas, it might even seem like everything is fine. The main feed of just all the images in the device’s memory and iCloud is still available. But if you accidentally swipe sideways on it, you end up in Carousel.
In tabs-cards Carousels you can set any type of content from your entire Photo library. By default, there is a lot of it there, this is configured on the last tab-card. And if you swipe to the side several times, including by accident, then you will no longer see the feed of all photos. To find it, you will need to swipe a random number of times until you get to it again.
I’m sure that your parents or relatives will ask you, as the main “techie” among relatives, the question: “Where are all my photos?” And another 125 questions, the answer to which will be difficult to explain remotely. Well, that is if Apple does not change the application again by the release.
By the way, I have repeatedly encountered a bug where new photos or screenshots are not displayed in the feed. And for some reason, there are no images saved from messengers or the browser. For them, you need to go to the section Recently savedwhich is located in Collections. Intuitively? Of course not. That’s brutal.
The Photos app has become a garbage dump
You can fix crashes, but the logic is more difficult.
Apple’s motive for massive modernization Photo and allow users to change a lot of things there for themselves is understandable to me. But what it turned into Photo now, it can’t be called anything other than a failure and a dump. Not only is there no intuitiveness and clarity of iOS, which is getting worse every year – everything has become much worse here than in any version of Android.
To the user from the application Photo no need for “bells and whistles” and “frills”. The user comes there to quickly show or look at photos, find a specific image or share it in another application, and also pass it on to others. That’s it. These tasks had to be simplified, and not piled up with 125 cross-type catalogings.
I really hope that Apple will think about users and postpone the release of the updated Photos app until late autumn to find a single and clear logic for its operation. And I really doubt that Cupertino will be able to sort out this mess of logical ideas that are incompatible with each other in just a month and a half by the September release of iOS 18.
Almost everything needs to be redone here, and also work on stability, since I constantly see crashes from the media library to the desktop. It is almost useless to clean up anything here. It is necessary to throw out everything and start from scratch, where zero is what users really needed from a photo and video storage program. And not what was easier to sell at a presentation or just to Apple’s “top brass” defending the project.
Source: www.iphones.ru
