People are a walking contradiction when it comes to tech. And many other things. But with tech, we all think we want shiny new things, yet we berate companies that provide sensible iterative updates. They’re boring! We want excitement! Only no, because when faced with a radically overhauled gadget or app, the most common result is a meltdown.
Witness the journey of Apple’s Photos app during the iOS 18 release cycle. Apple essentially took the old design – with tabs for Library, For You, Albums and Search – and tossed it into the trash. In iOS 18, you launched the app and were instead faced with a grid of photos that was part of a carousel you could swipe horizontally to access algorithmically grouped collections.
Photos in an early iOS 18 beta, with the carousel.
Scroll up and you’d head into a view to filter available photos, drilling down by date or filtering by type. Scroll down and you’d be immersed in a mishmash of further categories and collections, with little obvious logic as to how they were ordered. And there were other issues, not least the ridiculously tiny search button (as compared to its tab-based predecessor).
Apple called this a ‘unified app’ experience. Beta testers may have suggested a better term would be ‘a horrible, confusing, overwhelming mess’.
The redesign was such an affront that it threatened to eclipse clever stuff lurking elsewhere in the Photos revamp. Apple’s emphasis on automatic image grouping over manual sorting could move us all on from busywork. Hugely improved search made it easier to find cherished photos through natural language. The Profile view made it easier to spot what iCloud sync was doing.
This wasn’t Apple’s first redesign rodeo, though. Years ago, people griped en masse about a Safari revamp that upended how the tab bar appeared. Apple’s compromise was to allow you to revert to something resembling the older design. Not with Photos. The company ditched the carousel in iOS 18 beta 5, made it easier to access the Recently Saved album, and later shipped the result. That, it decided, was enough.
The final version of Photos in iOS 18, with few changes.
If nothing else, this was all a great reminder that none of this is in our control. Apple is an opinionated company. It might be guided by users to some degree, but mostly it does what it thinks is right. And Apple clearly thought – and still thinks – the new version of Photos is best. At least minus the carousel.
Fortunately, if you love looking at photos but now hate Photos, there’s hope, because Apple’s newfound interest in customization also made it into the app. So scroll way, way down, and under ‘Customize & Reorder’ turn off everything you don’t need. The result won’t quite be Photos from iOS 18. But it’s as close as you’ll get beyond finding an iPhone running iOS 17 and resolving to never update it because Apple ruined everything.