Apple made changes to the Photos app in iOS 18 to assist its users in their photo and video searches, although it seems to me that the app is now even more of a mess. This is a short guide on cleaning up and, to some extent, returning to the pre-iOS 18 design.
Hide and Reorder Collections
With iOS 18, the Photos app has abandoned the familiar tabbed layout and now only displays a single layout, which is a unified interface with all photos, videos, and collections in a main grid.
Collections include Recent Days, People, Memories, Featured Photos, and more. Luckily, Apple will provide a simple method to uncheck the ones you want to hide. Not sure? Keep reading. Here is what you will do:
- Tap your finger on the screen to open the button perspective, and navigate to the wastewater treatment plant area. Next, scroll over the image, tap the Customize button, and select your desired collections.
- Unselect all the collections you don’t want to see.
- Now, you can also tap the X button if you think it is better to scrap it completely.
Selecting Reset at the bottom of the page will restore the default layout to your screen. To the left, you should uncheck Shared Albums, People & Places, Media Types, and Utilities to get the layout which you are used to.
You can also change the order of your collections by moving things you use mostly at the top, while hiding others at the bottom, if you want to achieve a setup similar to the flocking herd. After following the same set of conditional statements, you can drag displacements wherever you want by starting with a long-press on a three-line set.
Take Advantage of Pinned Collections
At the end of an hour’s photo session, I have already clicked a heart on 200 of them. Eyeing them, I unconsciously start to filter out the pictures that I want to post on my socials by tapping the heart icon, located at the bottom of the screen, to save them to my Favorites album.
When I opened the Photos app in iOS 18, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the Favorites album. However, I found out that it is now under Pinned Collections.
Pinned Collections is another customizable feature of the Photos app. You can select the collections you want to be displayed here and reorganize them to thus have a neat gallery.
Before doing this, ensure you have not hidden Pinned Collections by going through the steps in the previous section. It is time to do the necessary configurations. The following instructions will guide you through the modification of your Pinned Collections.
- First, scroll to the bottom of the list of collections and look for Pinned Collections. Then, tap the Modify button next to it.
- Touch the minus (-) icon next to the pinned collection you do not need and go with Delete.
- To add a pinned collection, you will tap the plus (+) icon to your pinned collection under the Suggestions heading. Here, you can also add a collection or an album of your choice. It is that simple.
- In addition, if you prefer, you may also move pinned collections to wherever you desire by long-pressing the three lines and dragging them.
Recently Added
The Photos app in iOS 18 has been changed, and one of the changes annoyed me the most. By default, pictures are saved by the date and time they were taken. At that time, the images were placed in your library according to when you saved them to the Photos app.
To fix this:
- Firstly, search through your library and tap the sorting icon once it lets you.
- Choose Sort by Recently Added from the popup menu.
Now, when you open, download, or use AirDrop images and videos, they appear at the end of your library.
As an experienced iOS user and Apple enthusiast, I think that the updated Photos app has some initial difficulty for veteran iOS users.
