Thank You, Apple, for Fixing Your iPhone Photos App Mistakes
How did your country report this? Share your view in the comments.
Diverging Reports Breakdown
Thank You, Apple, for Fixing Your iPhone Photos App Mistakes
Apple is bringing back some of its menu to the iPhone Photos app. The change was announced as part of iOS 26, which is coming later this year. In iOS 18, Apple redesigned its Photos app to make it a more seamless scroll kind of situation. The new look features Apple’s new design style called Liquid Glass, and a big part of the design is expandable and collapsable menus from smaller, clear and rounded icons. The Photos app announcement is one of many the company is making today at WWDC.
This is the new look, in Apple’s new design style called Liquid Glass. Apple/Screenshot by CNET
The change was announced as part of iOS 26, which is coming later this year. (Yeah, it’s called iOS 26 now, not iOS 19!)
In iOS 18, Apple redesigned its Photos app to make it a more seamless scroll kind of situation, highlighting its automatically curated People & Pets collections at the expense of hiding all our folders down at the very bottom. Many people were upset about this, including several of CNET’s mobile experts. As someone with thousands of photos, I hated having to dig through every outtake and random screenshot to find what I wanted. Scrolling to the bottom of the Photos app to find my folders isn’t a long or arduous task, but it’s irritating — very much Apple trying to fix something I didn’t really see as broken.
And Apple knows we’ve been mad about this. Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of human interface, said, “Many of you missed using tabs in the Photos app. Photos now features separate tabs for library and for collections, where you’ll find your favorites, your albums and easy access to search.”
Sadly, we’re not going to see the return of the full menu, which featured more options right when you launched the app. In the preview Apple teased, only two options pop up when you open the app: library and collections. The search icon is also moved, lowered to the bottom. But the changes feature Apple’s new design style called Liquid Glass, and a big part of the design is expandable and collapsable menus from smaller, clear and rounded icons. So it’s possible we can expand the menu from those collections tabs and see other folders and albums; we’ll have to wait and see for sure with the release of iOS 26.
The Photos app announcement is one of many the company is making today at WWDC. You can check out all the updates in our live coverage here.