Since I use basically only Albums and Camera Roll (the latter for all the individual shots that don’t get their own album [1], that meant I just lost quick access to a whole chunk of my photos after upgrading to iOS 18.
This is the (tedious) workaround I used to get back quick access to my former Camera Roll pics. I attached my iPhone over USB to my Mac and launched Photos (still on Sonoma, no idea what Sequoia does to the Photos app). In Mac Photos clicking on the iPhone shows a list of what was formerly in Camera Roll. Using that as a guide, I went through the Library in iOS Photos and selected matches. Those selected pics then got added to a dedicated Camera Roll album I had manually created. After adding hundreds of photos to that album by hand, I had essentially recreated the old Camera Roll.
It goes without saying that this is just about quick access to photos. The pictures themselves were never lost and of course all remain there, just hidden away somewhere deep in Library. Because Library is just an endless long log of thousands of photos, it’s almost entirely without use to me.
I will say though that I actually like some of the changes to iOS 18 Photos despite all the complaints I read. That I can select to only show albums and get rid of all those other to me useless categories reduces clutter which is always great in my book. Now I have just Library and Albums. All I need. I prefer that over all the crud thrust in my face in iOS 17 Photos. But I would have appreciated a heads-up about Camera Roll. Had I known, it would have been much easier to make a dedicated album straight from all those Camera Roll photos before upgrading and losing that collection. Would have saved me a lot of manual searching through a vast mess of a Library.
This is why Recents is no replacement for Camera Roll the way I used it. The oldest photos in my Camera Roll are from ~2010. ↩︎
I haven’t upgraded to 18 yet but just yesterday discovered the freak out that the new Photos was causing with a lot of people (at least those posting online, that is).
There’s a number of good YouTube explainers about the new Photos, however. I found this one to be especially helpful:
I’m completely confused by this, Simon. What I see in Photos on iOS is that the entire upper half of the main screen is the Camera Roll. If I start scrolling in it, I see a task bar that shows options for scrolling by Years or Months. There is a search tool, a selection tool, and some options. (This is for a library of over 12,000 photos, the oldest of which goes back to the year 1923.)
I don’t feel like Photos hides these as all—in fact, it’s more like the whole Library is right there.
I’m just trying to understand what happened from your perspective.
I think what you’re referring to is Library. And it’s working fine for me up there. But, at least back in the day, Camera Roll was entirely separate. It was basically where pics resided before they got imported (at which point they become part of Library).
I probably need to clarify that this is all coming from the non-iCloud use angle, so there is no automated syncing of any sort. Unless something gets manually imported from Camera Roll, it will never end up in Library.
Thanks for the clarification. I do remember Camera Roll as a temporary album, and there were times I found it useful because it was just the images that came from the iPhone camera, without screen shots or other media mixed in.
I’m wondering if there is a Smart Album setting that would encompass images whose file names start with the prefix and opening serial numbers of your camera’s photos. I don’t have time to test it right now but it does seem like there should be a way to filter to one particular source. Just a thought.
Camera Roll disappeared some time ago. iOS 16, I think. Maybe iOS 15. It’s been called the Recents album since then.
And in my experience, both have always been a part of the Library. I’ve never seen any kind of waiting area where photos went before they entered the Library. Every photo has always appeared immediately in Library for me. That’s going back to my first iPhone (a Verizon (CDMA) iPhone 4, which according to MacTracker, initially came with iOS 4.2.5), and I’ve never used iCloud Photos (or any other cloud-based automatic photo syncing service).
I almost never use the Library view in iOS Photos. I normally use Album view. It avoids a lot of the fuss and bother Photos likes to throw at you in Library view. And most of my images get deleted from my iPhone after syncing them to my Mac, because I have little reason to keep them there. I can organize them much better and easier on my Mac with GraphicConverter and Adobe Lightroom Classic.
The only place where Camera Roll has been separate from Library is when you used a third-party app to sync images from your phone to your Mac instead of Photos on the Mac. (I use PhotoSync for this purpose.) If you sync images to your Mac outside of Photos.app, they don’t automatically appear in the Mac Photo Library.
If you do not use iCloud Photo sync (or before it Photo Stream its 1000-photo limited predecessor, forget the name), Camera Roll and Library remained entirely separate up to the point where you imported a Camera Roll photo. If you chose to delete upon import that photo would then live on only in Library, otherwise it would exist in both. But as long as you didn’t import it, it never existed outside of Camera Roll. I’m sure this was very different for those relying on cloud-based syncing.
When I plug this iOS 18 iPhone into my Mac, launch Mac Photos, and there clock on my iPhone, I’m still greeted by the same screen as on Sonoma where it shows me all my Camera Roll pictures with the only distinction being previously imported images “Already Imported” at the top and not yet imported images “New Items” at the bottom.
So that leads me to believe the iPhone itself even on iOS 18 still must have some kind of Camera Roll listing. My question would then be if that can be exposed any other way, or rather, if it can still be somehow exposed on the iOS side. I have no idea what changes are waiting form me with Sequoia Photos. Perhaps Photo’s entire Camera Roll screen goes away. I guess I’ll find out when I update my main personal Mac.
If you open the iOS Camera app with an unlocked iPhone (i.e., not from the Lock Screen), then tap in the lower-left corner, you can see the photos that are your Recents / Camera Roll; however, you can only see the images one-by-one, you can’t see them as a grid.
This isn’t as convenient, of course. I miss having my separate Recents view, which I use as a to-do or scratch area.
Open the Photos app. The bottom of the Library should show your most recent photos. One of the collections is called Recent Days. That collection shows your photos organized by day in reverse chronological order.
Note that you can filter which collections are visible and the order in which they are shown via the Customize & Reorder button at the bottom of the Photos app.
I have items in my camera roll that are over a year old, so a tip like this doesn’t help. (Why yes, I also have 24 tab groups in Safari. Why do you ask?) It appears that my (and probably Simon’s) use of the Camera Roll/Recents no longer matches the True Apple Way™️, which is disappointing.
I feel like I should clarify since the initial post might not have made this clear enough. New photos you take on iPhone show up in iPhone’s Library immediately (as the most recent, for me that’s at the very bottom) and the next time you sync with your Mac, they will then also show up in the Mac’s Photos Library. There is no problem at all here.
The thing that changed with the disappearance of Camera Roll is that if you have old photos that have never been migrated out of Camera Roll, you now might now have no way to easily find them (if you don’t know by heart what was in there).
The good news is that even in Sequoia connecting the iPhone to the Photos app will show a viewer that displays the photos that used to be in Camera Roll. You can use that to help you find those photos deep in the guts of iPhone Photos Library and copy them to any album you wish. And as @Oakwine pointed out, the iPhone Camera app offers a conduit to that same listing too.
Bottom line: no photos disappear or get lost. The thing that changes is how you find a select few photos from a long time ago (if you happen to have any of those) and make them once again easily accessible.
Just one more data point to clarify recent changes with iOS 18.
My wife’s iPhone is still on iOS 17 so I tested there. Took a photo. It shows up in Recents. Sync her iPhone to her Mac. Unplug. Check out the Mac Library to find that pic NOT there. Using Mac Photos you first have to import that pic for it to show up in the Mac Photos Library. And if you then sync the iPhone, that pic will from then on show up in both Libraries.
This is vastly different with iOS 18. If I take a pic with my iPhone, that picture is shown as part of iOS Photos Library right away. So if I then connect to my Mac and do a sync, the Mac Photos Library shows that pic in the Library the moment the sync is done. No importing necessary.
What I take home from this is that Recents on iOS 17 is not a subset of Library but rather some kind of special waiting space outside of Library. But on iOS 18 a pic you take automatically goes to Library so all it takes to get it onto a Mac is a simple sync.
Me personally, I very much prefer the new approach.
Please make sure you watch the YouTube video from Dylan. In there, he explains how to view your Recent photos and your recent imports with just a couple of taps to swap between those sortings.
It’s true that it’s not quite the same thing as what you had before, but if you import the oldies but goodies that you like to keep at hand, then they will show up with a Recent Import sort. If those photos are helpful to have around, you should probably stick them into a collection that you can then put on the main screen of Photos using Dylan’s tips in his final chapter ( https://youtu.be/DHb5I0jpxEA?t=702&si=orkGYnnOiBmLoBVh ). And your new shots will always be findable in Recent Pictures.
Yes, that’s the same YouTube video I linked to and suggested as the first reply to this thread. It’s extremely helpful if you’re at all confused with the new Photos app or think you’ve lost a preferred way of doing something with it.
