… or any other digital media device, like a standalone camera or a camera’s memory card.
Maybe in your case. When I travel with my standalone camera, I sync my pictures within a day or two of returning home, because I can’t show those pictures to anyone until after I’ve offloaded them. So there would typically be one roll for each trip, possibly also containing miscellaneous pictures from the time between two trips.
Which is why there was always the ability to split/merge rolls. So you could make the boundaries line up intelligently, in a situation like this.
And the Imports utility doesn’t replace this because it is just a smart-folder filtering on the import-date. Whereas a Camera Roll object is an actual collection of images that can be managed. The initial configuration is based on when you import pictures, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Okay, gotcha. I hate to belabor the point, but if you’re going to start splitting / merging camera rolls, then you’re basically managing your photos by hand. You could use Albums for that.
Or, if you are splitting/merging based on date/location, you can enjoy the convenience of the modern methods that automatically organize based on metadata.
I feel for your situation. But I spend a lot of time doing UX professionally. I deal with a lot of customers who ask for features because they want to do things “the way they’ve always done it” and because they refuse to learn more empowering technologies. And I’ll say that if I was in charge of this product, I would definitely have abandoned the Camera Roll feature in favor of the modern alternatives.
No. One camera roll existed on the iPhone, always. It wasn’t created or deleted.
Any pic you took got automatically added to it. And the only time something got removed from it was when you synced photos from the camera roll to your Library. At least for the non-iCloud Photos (and the thing before with the 1000-pic limit that I can’t remember the name) using crowd this was a very simple yet clear container: it’s where all your snapped images end up as long as you do not explicitly relegate them to some other location of your choosing (like an album). Just like in an old-fashioned camera (if it had infinite film). That analogy IMHO made perfect sense. And for the non-iCloud crowd still would I believe.
Edit: I’ll add that this isn’t equivalent to today’s Library. For the simple reason that Library contains everything. It’s a big grab bag. Camera roll OTOH was the place where the only stuff you’d find is pics you snapped that you hadn’t specifically sent some place else (like an album). To make matters worse, Library exists on both macOS and iOS, and they don’t have to be identical — they only get synced up after you explicitly command a sync. Camera roll existed only on iPhone. It did not get auto-synced to anywhere on macOS. Only if your iPhone was connected to the Mac, could you from the Mac see camera roll photos, by selecting the connected iPhone. Again, following precisely the analogy of an actual film roll in your camera.
The iPhoto app on macOS implemented a collection of “film rolls” (the full set of them comprising the Library), which I was mistakenly calling “camera rolls” until now. By default, one would be created for each import, but you could move photos into and out of them, as well.
These film rolls were a physical location - a photo would always exist in exactly one roll at a time. Different from albums, where a photo could appear in many albums at once.
But this concept went away a long time ago. I think it was removed from iPhoto before the transition to Photos. (After a bit of web searching, it went away as a part of the transition to Photos. When migrating an iPhoto library to Photos, each film roll became an album. Which I later organized into per-year folders, to keep it from becoming unmanageable.)
Hehe, no, that stuff is ancient, like 2006. The only recent “Camera Roll” was the one in iOS Photos up to and including IIRC iOS 17. It went away with the Photos redesign in iOS 18.
That old guy that kept an old Mac to use iPhoto, that’s me. Have they figured out out to quickly review your photos and rate them (and cull them)? No? that’s why I have/use iPhoto. Although I see there is an app called Nitro that will do that as simply as iPhoto did… Cost$100 tho.