Finding photos on the iPhone can be hard sometimes. Although there are a ton of ways to go through photos on the iPhone, the most common way is to rush to the camera roll, zap through the photos as quickly as possible and pause whenever you find the right photo. Apple is currently working on an update that will redesign the layout of Photos, which organizes shots into easy-to-browse days, months, and years.
As it is, Apple’s photo app seems very organized but quickly becomes very disorganized as you search through it. The ”For You” tab has the best of the last pictures taken from whenever and randomly selected photos from random periods. Now the photo search functionality shows you pictures from “summer”, “spring”, “trips”, “dining”, “a year ago” and so on. And when you switch to the chronologically listed photo gallery, the photos are so tiny, you can hardly pick out which picture you want. So really, your best bet is to sift through the camera roll.
At the recently concluded WWDC, Apple just announced a change with Days, Months, and Years selections. This means that a new set of tabs will be added to the available default design with different durations.
The new default mode will look very similar to camera roll, and with the new selection features, you can choose “Days” instance. This will show a selection of large and mosaiced images with live photos active. Each day will be marked by a full-width shot so that you can move seamlessly to other days. The ordering is quite simple too because recent photos will appear towards the bottom.
Just like “Days” streamlines photos by days, “Months” does the same for months. It compresses each calendar month of shots into a handful of events. Click on “Years” and you get a similar experience.
Of course, Photos already had an “on this day” type feature, but this makes much more sense to me. You can dive into a year and it breaks into months, and of course, months break into days. It’s just a more efficient way of scrubbing through your camera roll — though I have no doubt we’ll still do that from time to time.
This is not a major update to Apple’s Photo filtering system but small tweaks like this make life easy for users. Also, users interact with their phots quite a lot so this is a minor upgrade to the iOS that could make a lot of people like myself really happy.
