The new Photos app in iOS 18 just doesn't do it for me; in fact, I can't stand the changes they've made to the UI and navigation. I am firmly in the camp that feels the photo library is a feature, a utility to be used by other apps. Apple, however, wants Photos to be a destination, a product with a unique UI, flashy features and user retention gimmicks. Whether these two things should be two different apps, I don't know, but what we've got here isn't an app I want to have my photos in anymore
It's worth saying: none of this would be a problem if the Photos app were a user-replaceable component like antitrust regulators in the EU desire. I could just replace the Photos app, which is clearly going off in a direction I want nothing to do with, with an alternative that looks and functions like the old one
@stroughtonsmith How is it not possible today? If you squint, Peek‑a‑View is a Photos.app replacement.
@caseyliss @stroughtonsmith There’s a lot of functionality that only the Photos app can access and isn’t in the public PhotoKit API (captions and face/object recognition just to name a couple)
@bwebster @caseyliss @stroughtonsmith Can’t third party apps already implement these by themselves? Google Photos has face recognition.
@vinski @caseyliss @stroughtonsmith The face recognition is the easy part. But then there would be no way for that app to store its results as part of the photo library database so it would be available to any other app that accesses the library. Only Photos can do that. Not that other apps can even access Photos’ face info right now in the first place…