Does anyone know how to navigate the new photos app? It now doesn't make any sense with voiceover. I can't find my camera roll, and there are no more tabs on the bottom. Now it's just seems to be a random collection of all of the photos on my phone, and all unorganized, doesn't make sense. Is it just me struggling with this?
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Navigate by headings
Navigating by headings seems to work at a cursory glance.
Doesn't work for me.
Navigating by headings works, but I still can't find my camera roll. I just want to see all my pictures in one folder like I had before. There are a few different albums but the camera roll is gone.
Use Seeing AI as an alternative
Hi.
Since a few versions Seeing AI has an accessible image browser that I use since the app was changed in the iOS 18 betas.
Open the app, change the category to scene descriptions and hit the button that opens your foto library. Tapping on an image will generate a short description of the image, to get an AI interpretation of the immage, hit the more info button on the bottom.
The cool thing is, if you select an image and let Seeing AI generate the shorter description and then go back to the foto library, the app remembers said short description and will use it as a lable for the foto. You need to scan in every foto once, but if you do you have a foto browser with automatic lables. Works without a problem for me.
Greetings Moritz.
Library view is the new camera roll
The library view is the new camera roll. To access it, navigate to the the top-most collection you can access using VO's headings rotor. Then double-tap and hold, and then drag down. This would put you into the library view, which functions as the camera roll.
Note, however, that if you choose to zoom in by selecting the zoom in option found under the view options menu (which is found by activating the sort and filter button on the bottom-left of the screen), the photos list is completely inaccessible with VO. Only the default size is accessible.
Not able to make it work
So, the first collection that I can navigate to is Recent Days. After navigating to it, I double tap and hold, then drag down. Nothing happens.
And also, where is my favorite folder? Of course, When I navigate through photos, it anounces the favorite status when the focus lands on a specific photo that I have favorited. But again, one would like to access all favorite photos together, as we could do earlier.
Reorder items and use the Pinned features
Yes, the new Photos layout will take some time to get use to. By default the layout and navigation of it is frustrating with VoiceOver. There is a way to regain control of Photos. The below link give you some ideas on how to reorder/remove items in the Photos and using Pinned items to recreate a pseudo tab-like structure:
https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/hate-ios-18s-new-photos-app-try-these-fixes-to-make-it-more-like-the-old-version
Basically this starts with navigating to the bottom of the scroll to Customize and Reorder button. From there unselect any items you do not want. On mine, I just have Pin, Utilities, and Albums selected.
Next head over to Pinned collections and swipe once more to the right to Modify. Use rotor actions to delete unwanted items and glance at the options below Suggestions for other options. Here I just have Favorites and Media Types.
This should make the Photos more manageable.manageable
@Tim Hornik
Thanks for the great tip! 👍☺️
Re: Not able to make it work
Maybe try holding down more firmly? I experienced that too but managed to get the library view to show when I hold my finger down more firmly before sliding down.
select
If you want to see all pictures from top slide right until you hear VO say select. Is not label but that shows me all pictures from recent to old.
flicking through images.
Is everyone having an issue when flicking through images with VO? and no, it's not just in the photos app but it's everywhere I see an image, Voiceover doesn't see it when your doing the swipes but if you explore by touch, it's fine. Is there a fix for this at all?
What do you mean?
What do you mean by voiceover doesn’t see it? Do you mean that it’s not finding the images, or not giving you image descriptions? Or something else?
It's not seeing the images…
It's not seeing the images themselves. Images descriptions works just fine but when you actually are trying to flick, focus goes nuts Lol.
Oh, I see…
Oh, I see what you mean. Unfortunately, that focus bug has been around for quite a while. It’s not really anything new, even though the Photos app has been significantly changed. Ye old focus bug is still here, unfortunately.
RE: Reorder items and use the Pinned features
These suggestions work somewhat, but there are still many issues. Like just having unlabled buttons throughout the app, after the pinned collection category. Apple needs to fix these issues. I don't know how these get past testing. I can't imagine sighted people being happy with it either, it seems so disorganized compared to how it was before.
Eurgh
I've just upgraded to iOS 18 and my first impression of the new Photos app is that they looked at what Sonos had done with their app and thought "yeah that went pretty well, we'll have some of that".
I'm a bit worried that there is a trend towards getting rid of tabs and replacing with one enormous and unwieldy list of absolutely everything.