Andrew O'Hara
The stock Photos app on the iPhone and iPad is home to all the images you shoot on your devices. Apple has made some great improvements in their massive iOS 12 update and AppleInsider is going in to show you everything that has changed.
For you
The most noticeable change is the new tab titled "For You." It replaces the outgoing "Memories" and "Shared" tabs and combines both of those categories as well as additional content.
Think of it almost as the Photos equivalent of the Apple Music "For You" tab. Along the top is a sprawling feed of shared album activity. Below are sharing suggestions. These are based on the AI's ability to recognize people in the photos. If it recognizes someone, it will suggest you share that album with them.
Memories is next, which is largely unchanged from iOS 11, comes next. It will promote different memories it thinks you may be interested in looking at, and new ones as they are made.
A new section called Featured Photos will highlight photos it thinks are well done.
At the bottom are effect suggestions. These will be for any Portrait Mode or Live Photo's you've taken. It could suggest photos that are great for a loop effect, or where they could be brightened up with Studio Lighting.
Search
Searching for photos is way more powerful in iOS 12. Siri is able to help out looking out for more specific memories. Within Photos, Search has been upgraded to its own tab.
When actually performing a search, it is significantly faster than in the past (a common theme in iOS 12).
Multiple terms can also be linked together. After you search for something — like "water" — related terms will be presented below. Tapping any with add them to the query, fine-tuning the search. For our water search, we got suggestions based on locations, lake vs ocean, and dates.
There are also more search terms than ever. You could search for places in the past, but you can now be even more specific. You can search for photos taken at something like One Line Coffee, or even just "coffee shops" in general.
Imports
On the iPad, there are lots of changes to photo imports. AppleInsider covered them more in-depth in our iPad and iOS 12 feature, but it should make photographers overjoyed.
When importing photos from a camera or SD card, they can now be imported directly to a new or existing album rather than into the camera roll. Previously imported photos will be sorted out into their own section on the top, photos can be previewed full-screen before importing, during the import, the progress indicator can show the number of photos remaining, and import speed overall is quicker.
Tweaks
There are other minor changes as well. All media type albums have new icons. This looks better and makes it easy to tell which albums are which.
Swiping through albums is now horizontal versus vertical, which allows much more to be fit into the tab. Scrolling vertically goes between the different categories such as My Albums, Shared Albums, People & Places, Media Types, and Other Albums.
Other Albums is handy and shows imports, hidden photos, and those recently deleted.
Keep shooting
It is nice to see Apple putting so much effort into improving the stock Photos app, as it used to be problematic with large libraries. While there is still work to do, daily users should be happy with all the changes Apple has implemented.
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Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
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William Gallagher
17 Comments
It's still totally inadequate for families. Album sharing as implemented is not suitable for sharing tens of thousands of photos between spouses, like taking daily pictures of your kids.
AppleInsider, if you could do a deep dive on best practices for family photo sharing I would LOVE to read that. It's one of those things maybe you don't realize is a problem until you have kids and then, oh boy, is it a problem. You guys are really good at digging in an exercising the features and exploring all the options.
For instance we have had to resort to using photo import by wire into one of our libraries and use that as the "family" library. But that means only one of us can look at the whole library on our iOS devices. If we were to use the shared album feature, not only is the sharing process manual and error prone (meaning it's hard to know if we shared all the right photos), but we don't get any of the first-class library features for organizing our family photos like moments or searching.
Just bring back iPhoto.
And, Apple, if you’re going to ‘tweak’ anything at all, just frikkin’ add the functionality to easily get rid of duplicates (or more). Surely, it has to be be far easier to recognize duplicates than faces?
I went to Peru recently and shot about 1600 photos and videos with my iphoneX....all the time, every day...and that‘s where the problems with Photo became visible...not only would it not switch to landscape mode but lots of other errors popped up like the iPhone shooting (20,40,60....) series of photos just because I slightly raised it, another bug manifests itself when showing videos using apple TV using screen synch..it works really bad..there are many, many other errors in the existing app and I hope they just fix those
I really like Photos - I have almost every single photo I've taken back to 1972 on there and it works fine and being able to pull my iPad out anywhere and find almost any of those 10,000+ photos straight away is a regular joy. But ... you still need a Mac to get the best out of the iOS version:
Can only locate/geotag a photo on a map taken with an SLR when using a Mac
Can only change a photo's title on a Mac
Can only add keywords on a Mac
The first two omissions are by far the worst. Image analysis is amazing but there is no way (yet) for it to identify a particular car model, a particular beach, a name of a pet, a particular party etc. etc. In photos for Mac I can add this information so that if I want to find "Fred's 50th" or "classic car run" I can do so almost instantly. If I had only iOS it would require a lot of scrolling around. The inability to add a photo's location may not be noticeable to many users if all your photos are taken on a GPS enabled camera but for those of us shooting on a non-GPS SLR it would be a real loss to lose all that location information both to viewing and searching. If you are trying to use your iPad instead of a MacBook you'll have to hold onto that Mac.
All things Apple could sort with little effort.