So I finally caved and installed iOS 18 on Saturday night, two days after it went out to everyone, because I wanted to see what all the WWDC hype back in June actually turned into. Most of it is fine. Some of it is genuinely good. And then there's the Photos app, which I've now opened probably forty times since Saturday and still haven't fully figured out.
Here's the thing that's bugging me. The old Photos app had a tab bar at the bottom (Library, For You, Albums, Search) and you always knew where you were. Tap Library, get your grid, done. That's gone now. It's this single scrolling view where the grid is buried under a stack of auto-generated collections (Pinned, People and Pets, Recent Days, trip collages, whatever the algorithm decided you'd want to see). You have to scroll past a chunk of curated stuff just to get to your actual photos in order. I take a lot of screenshots for work — receipts, reference images, stuff off Slack — and now they're all mixed into this "highlights" flow that keeps trying to turn my screenshot of a spreadsheet into a nostalgic memory. It isn't one, Apple. It's a spreadsheet.
I'm not the only one annoyed either. I was scrolling through some tech forums Sunday night and the Photos redesign was clearly the most complained-about part of this whole release, more than any of the actual new features. Apple's had the same rough Photos layout for years and honestly I'd gotten used to it, so maybe some of this is just me being resistant to change. But I don't think that's all of it. Burying the plain, chronological, non-curated grid a scroll-and-a-half down feels like a decision made by someone who wants Photos to be more like a content feed and less like, you know, a place where your files live.
The genuinely good stuff, quickly, because I don't want this to be all complaining. RCS is finally here for real. I've got a couple of Android friends I text with constantly and as of this week those threads have typing indicators and read receipts and actual full-resolution photos instead of the garbage compressed JPEGs we've all been suffering through since forever. It's a small thing but it's the kind of small thing that makes a phone feel less like it's fighting you. Control Center is also way more customizable now, and I like being able to drop a widget for my thermostat app up there instead of digging through Home every time.
There's a "Recaps" feature in the new Photos app too, basically Apple's answer to the Spotify Wrapped thing, where it auto-builds a short highlight video from a batch of your photos on a theme. Mine made one about my dog and it was actually kind of sweet, so credit where it's due. But it's also exactly the kind of feature that explains why the app feels so cluttered now. Everything's optimized for these curated, algorithmic moments instead of just letting you find your pictures. Two different apps trying to live in one and neither one is winning.
Unrelated tangent, but this is also the week Amazon told its corporate staff they're back to five days in the office starting in January, no more hybrid schedule, and reading that memo right after fighting with my own Photos app for twenty minutes put me in kind of a mood about tech companies deciding what's good for the rest of us. Not really the same topic, I know. It just felt connected somehow, this idea that the people who build the tools we use every day keep quietly deciding they know better than we do how we should use them.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about updating, RCS alone is worth it if you text Android people regularly. Just budget some time to relearn where your own pictures went. I still haven't found the fastest way back to a plain grid without a couple extra taps, and I've looked. If anyone's found a shortcut for that, genuinely, let me know.