By Jason Snell

September 16, 2024 12:00 PM PT

In iOS 18, Photos brings Collections to the fore

One of the biggest changes to Apple’s devices this fall is the release of a new version of Photos, one that contains some pretty major interface changes—especially on the iPhone and iPad. I’ve spent the summer working on a new edition of my book about Photos and so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what Apple’s trying to do here.

Put simply, Apple continues to grapple with the fact that the Photos app serves two very different purposes.

On the one hand, the app is the definitive media library for people using Apple’s ecosystem of devices, as represented by the Library view. This is the app you go to to find an image you’ve captured, whether it was 10 seconds or 10 years ago. It’s a reference library and a utility, and if you need to quickly grab a picture you just shot in order to send it somewhere, you need to be able to do it quickly and easily.

But on the other hand, for a decade Apple has invested a lot of effort into making Photos a vehicle for discovery of the amazing stuff that is contained in those same voluminous media libraries. Apple has been using machine-learning technology, suddenly the talk of the tech world, for a decade in Photos, identifying the people and objects in photos so that it can better understand what it’s got. And then it has spent even more work trying to build systems that can organize and recommend those photos and videos to you, the person who took them.

Back when I started taking lots of digital photos (in the early 2000s), there was no way to do this. You had to go through your photos and apply tags or keywords to each one manually. Organization was by time stamp alone, and geotagging was an unheard-of concept. Thanks to GPS stamps on smartphone photos, and the machine-learning stuff in Photos, it’s now child’s play to say “show me pictures of my kids in Hawaii” and get hundreds of images within seconds.

And yet I think Apple realized that since the Photos app always launched in Library view, a lot of people had no idea that behind the scenes, Apple had built an entire curation system that was designed entirely to delight users with pictures and videos of loved ones from across decades of history. And, really, what’s the point in building a giant media library if you never revisit those photos and videos?

So the new version of Photos doesn’t launch to the Library view, with a bunch of tabs at the bottom that apparently few people clicked on. Instead, it launches to a new hybrid view (thankfully simplified and tweaked since the original iOS beta earlier this summer) that displays the familiar Library grid in the top two-thirds of the screen, with a series of Collections in the bottom third. When you scroll up, you’re in classic Library view. When you scroll down, you’re seeing the multitude of ways that Photos can automatically carve up and re-serve you the contents of your Library in ways that make sense and are pleasing.

I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.

The default top Collection, Recent Days, is remarkably utilitarian: it’s literally a way to quickly browse through recent days of images and videos, so you can jump back to that thing you shot three days ago. And then there are Collections featuring people and pets (and, for the first time, user-definable groupings of those people and pets), Photos-generated Memories and Featured Photos, collections of trips you’ve taken (applying dates and geotagging information in a smart way), and even suggestions for good images to use as wallpapers.

In past versions of Photos, Apple focused a lot of its energy on auto-generated collections called Memories, which collected together photos and videos on somewhat random subjects (“at the park!” “pet friends!”) on a somewhat random basis. They were pretty sophisticated collections, offering an automatically generated slideshow movie and a curated view of photos rather than every single item that matched the theme.

Memories still exist, but what Apple has done is taken the entire Memories concept—a slideshow movie and a curated collection of items—and applied it to every single Collection in the Collections view. So whether you’re looking at a Recent Days collection of last Tuesday, a Trips view of your summer visit to the shore, a People & Pets group, pretty much whatever, it ends up in a Collection view, complete with that slideshow movie. It’s a pretty rich collection of stuff, and just as important, it’s a consistent interface, which Photos lacked before.

Apple has also boosted Search in Photos again. You can still search for keywords and locations and dates, and it’ll work. But if you just want to natural-language search for “Julian at the beach in Oregon,” that’ll do the trick. It works really well.

As with everything else this fall, the other shoe to drop involves Apple Intelligence. Photos will gain a feature where you can just type a suggestion and Photos will build a Memory of that for you, on demand. But more importantly, Photos is finally getting proper background removal support across iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the introduction of Clean Up, another Apple Intelligence feature. In general, it works really well. I just wish Apple hadn’t waited until 2024 to launch this feature—and limit it to devices powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence—since you could use the Photomator app to do this on the iPad five years ago.

It’s a consequential year for Photos on iPhone and iPad. (The Mac is updated too, but there’s no real interface overhaul—you can get to Collections via the Sidebar, as always.) I think I understand Apple’s moves here and I support them. Yes, people who prefer Photos to be an utterly utilitarian look into your camera roll will probably feel that Collections is poking its nose in where it doesn’t belong. But the benefits of showing off the contents of the Library in more creative ways than a grid of your most recent entries are just too powerful to be ignored.

Apple’s design changes will mean that more people will discover great stuff in their Library. That’s the whole idea. I think it’s the right thing to do.

By Dan Moren

September 16, 2024 10:09 AM PT

iOS 18 Review: Your iPhone, your way

Perhaps more than any of Apple’s other operating systems, iOS is about balance. For many people, their iPhone is their primary computer—in some cases, their only computer. Every year, Apple rolls out new features to the platform, but it wants to do so in such a way that it enhances the experience of using its phones without getting in the way of users who rely on the device.

This year’s update, iOS 18, walks that line carefully. There are new improvements that range from those that won’t really affect you unless you seek them out (big changes to home screen customization, for one) to those that will impact every single person who uses a phone (a brand new interface for Photos). The good news is that most of these features also come to the iPad too.

Perhaps the strangest part of this year’s update, however, is what’s not there. Apple has spent several months talking up Apple Intelligence, its suite of generative AI features that do everything from help enhance your writing to create imagery for you, and lots of other stuff in between. It even launched several ads about the features last week. But Apple Intelligence won’t start rolling out until iOS 18.1 arrives in October—which means, yes, I suppose we’ll be back to talk about them when they do eventually show up.

While those features—or their lack—might overshadow some of the other announcements in iOS 18, when you strip them away, you’re still left with a nice—if not mind-blowing—set of updates. At this point in the iOS life cycle, there’s nothing wrong with some modest improvements. And the benefit of lots of smaller features means that there’s a little something for everybody in iOS 18.

Continue reading “iOS 18 Review: Your iPhone, your way”…

By Jason Snell

September 16, 2024 10:08 AM PT

iPadOS 18 Review (ish): Math notes, calculator, and weird tab bars

This year, there’s good news on the iPadOS front: A bunch of features that in recent years might have been limited to iOS are also available in iPadOS 18! For example, the ability to customize home screens is going to change the look of iPad screens—and iPad users won’t have to wait until the fall of 2025 to get what iPhone users got the year before. I like this trend. (See Dan’s full review of iOS 18 for more on the full details of that release.)

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that’s special for iPad users. There are really only a handful of new features. They’re interesting, and very iPad, but there aren’t a lot of them. And, of course, the iPad joins the iPhone in waiting for Apple Intelligence features, whenever those arrive.

Continue reading “iPadOS 18 Review (ish): Math notes, calculator, and weird tab bars”…

By Jason Snell

September 16, 2024 10:00 AM PT

macOS Sequoia 15.0 review: The opening act

When I go to concerts, I always feel bad for the opening acts. No matter how good they are, no matter how hard they try, they’re just not the reason the audience is there. At one memorable show in my hometown music venue, the opening act asked the people at the bar to kindly keep their conversations down a little bit while she was performing. (They continued to ignore her.)

What I’m saying is, macOS 15.0 Sequoia is here, but all anyone wants to know about is version 15.1. As with iOS and iPadOS, this fall’s release is the one that will begin to deeply integrate machine-learning models, dubbed Apple Intelligence, throughout the operating system. But the point-oh versions entirely lack those anticipated features, which won’t arrive until point-one.

This is not to say that there aren’t a bunch of new Mac features in macOS Sequoia 15.0. This release contains some classic Apple moves, like adding a feature found in third-party Mac utilities for years, but with a simplified “now it’s for everybody” feature set. It’s got some surprising (to me, anyway) and useful integrations with the rest of its ecosystem that make the Mac and iPhone work together like never before. A useful OS feature has gotten promoted to a full-fledged utility app, hopefully with the end result of more people using it. One of my favorite Messages features, left for years to dry on the vine, has finally gotten a long-deserved expansion. Safari has received a bunch of updates that should help users cut through the distractions and confusion of the Web.

And this release also features Apple’s continued ratcheting up of its macOS security and privacy procedures—which isn’t a bad thing on its own, but comes with associated degradations of the user experience that Apple doesn’t seem appropriately concerned about mitigating.

There’s a lot here, even without Apple Intelligence. And those features—modest though they’ll be, at least to start—will be along soon enough. The rock star is back stage, diving into a bowl of green M&Ms. But you bought the ticket, you’ve got a drink in hand, and this opening act is going to sing its heart out for you.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall”—er, I mean, here’s macOS Sequoia 15.0.

Continue reading “macOS Sequoia 15.0 review: The opening act”…