Apple has removed the carousel from the iPhone’s and iPad’s Photos on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 and made other changes to improve navigation.
I was disappointed seeing iOS 18’s revamped Photos app for the first time. While I liked the new look, I couldn’t believe how broken navigation was. The most distracting element was that carousel at the top, where you could swipe left or right to switch between collections like Featured, Favorites, etc.
The carousel was supposed to surface your favorite moments, but its implementation got in the way of clean navigation. Thankfully, Apple has listened to early beta feedback as the fifth and sixth betas of iOS 18 ditch the carousel from the top of Photos while making a few other changes that improve usability.
iOS 18: Apple fixes the Photos app
The app still sports an all-in-one design with no tab navigation. Ditching the carousel in the latest beta has freed up more space for your images and videos in the main view, with an expanded library view always available by swiping up.
The Recent Days collection now houses your Recently Saved stuff, which used to live under the Utilities section in earlier betas. Your various other collections like People and Pets, Trips and Memories are there (on iOS 17, this was in the For You section), along with the Media Types, Utilities and Wallpaper Suggestions.
Previously, you could swipe horizontally between different collections, but now you browse them by scrolling down, which is a more logical approach. You’ll also notice that the Days and Albums section now use a card-based interface.
Like before, you can customize the order of these collections and turn off ones you don’t want to see by choosing Customize & Reorder at the very bottom.
Apple will continue testing iOS 18 throughout the summer. iOS 18, iPadOS18 and other OS updates will be released to the public in the fall.
Apple infuses the Photos app with AI features
iOS 18’s Photos overhaul mainly revolves around automatic curation powered by Apple Intelligence. AI automatically creates themed collections on your behalf, but you can also create them manually and pin your favorites to find them quickly.
To address cases when long-deleted items might reappear in Photos years later because of a database corruption issue, iOS 18’s Photos automatically recovers lost or damaged media and saves them in Utilities > Recovered.
Apple also fixed the broken image selection by adding proper Select and Search buttons to the Photos interface in the second beta of iOS 18. Previously, you would need to swipe down to reveal the Select button, which was maddening.