Introduction

The iPhone Photos app has been a go-to for iOS users for years. It stores and organizes images taken on the phone by time and date. As a pre-installed app, saving images within the Apple ecosystem is fairly seamless. The app has changed through many iOS updates, but the current version, 26.6.1, has been especially jarring. This critique focuses on the app’s organization.

Collections and Hierarchy

The previous version of the Photos app had a mix of user-created and Apple-generated albums in a single-screen interface. At the top, users could locate their gallery and albums, including the Favorites album, on a horizontal scroll, while Apple-generated folders like Screenshots, Videos, Live Photos, and Recently Deleted appeared below on a vertical scroll with a clear visual distinction between the two.

The current version now separates the library and the collections pages. While it seems simple enough, the collections tab now houses many albums and categories, including Memories, Recent Days, People, Trips, Featured Photos, Albums, Shared Albums, Media Types, Utilities, Wallpaper Suggestions, and more. Most of these categories not only overlap but also contain multiple album files within them on the horizontal scroll, adding another layer to the hierarchy. Alongside these Apple-generated categories are the user-created albums, which now blend in with the rest of the folders.

Hence, retrieving a single folder like screenshots would now entail locating the Media Types tab, scrolling past the other categories within it to find the screenshots folder, and then selecting the required image. The mapping of these categories doesn’t always explain why something belongs where it does, making retrieval even less predictable. The option for pinning albums helps, but users would first have to discover and learn it.

Too much information on the page, combined with no clear reasoning for album hierarchies, is quite overwhelming and further complicates the app’s conceptual model. A possible fix might be to merge overlapping categories, create a clear visual distinction between user-generated and Apple-created albums, and prioritize frequently viewed categories at the top of the page.

Library and Navigation

The library, earlier available on the collections page, is now a standalone tab in the Photos app. It is a gallery of all available images, shown at once as a grid. Apple allows users to sort these images by month and year, as well as in standard view, through a navigation bar at the bottom. Another useful navigation for the library is zooming in and out of the grid itself, which allows the user to view multiple thumbnails at once. This is a strong example of feedback: zooming immediately changes the size and number of images, directly matching the action on the screen.

The navigation bar itself is less successful. The All/Months/Years navigation appears and disappears depending on scroll direction. The Liquid Glass interface adds another problem: transparent controls sit over an already visually heavy background of photographs, making some signifiers less prominent.

Further, while the months and years tab affords navigation through the photos over time, the view all section fails to show which way the latest image will appear. The Photos app places the newest image at the bottom right and arranges all images in a left-to-right chronology, the way text is written. However, different cultures may write and arrange timelines differently. Unless you’re a long-term Apple user, these navigations aren’t intuitive or universal.

Inconsistent Controls and Signifiers

Within the app, Photos offers many ways to customize how images are displayed, including sorting, filtering, zooming, changing the grid, pinning collections, and changing aspect ratios. However, many of these functions are hidden behind menu icons.

For example, Photos uses both a three-dot icon and a three-line icon to house different functions. These visually similar controls don’t clearly signify what each contains, so users must open them to understand the available actions.

The pages also use different navigation systems. A simple control to go back to the start appears on the bottom left of the library page (the icon itself) and on the top left within albums (as a back arrow). The trips collection has an additional navigation bar, while the rest are more haphazardly arranged for view.

The affordances exist, but weak signifiers and inconsistencies reduce discoverability. Stronger visual distinction between controls and keeping commonly used functions visible could make these features easier to find.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Photos offers considerably more functionality than its earlier versions. Features such as pinning, filtering, zooming, and different temporal views provide useful customization and often strong feedback once used. The problem is therefore not necessarily the number of affordances, but whether the interface maps and communicates them successfully. More functionality is only useful when users can discover and understand how to use it.