Goodbye, Camera Roll: Where to find your photos in iOS 8
Apple has reimagined the way photos are stored on your devices with iOS 8, but it has become a source of confusion for users and causes compatibility problems with some third-party apps. AppleInsider took a look at where your photos have gone and how to find them again.
What was once in the Camera Roll...
The Camera Roll has been around iOS since late Apple CEO Steve Jobs pulled the first-generation iPhone out of his pocket on stage in San Francisco. It was a simple concept: an infinite list of every photo you've ever taken.
Until now, nearly every interaction with photos on an iOS device was done through the Camera Roll. Showing vacation pics to your friends? Camera Roll. Choosing a selfie to upload to Facebook? Camera Roll.
...can still be found in Collections.
As of iOS 8, the Camera Roll is no more. This alarmed many users who thought their photos had disappeared following the update, but fear not --?your selfies are safe and sound.
The closest thing to the traditional Camera Roll is the Collections view, which can be found in the Photos tab at the bottom of the Photos app. Collections organizes snaps into Moments based on their capture date and the location where they were taken, which actually makes it easier to find a specific shot from the past.
Apps looking for the missing Camera roll default to Recently Added, which has caused some confusion.
The Collections view can be a bit unwieldy when looking for photos that you took recently. For that, Apple will show photos taken in the last 30 days inside a new Recently Added album in the Albums tab.
Unfortunately, this presents a problem for third-party apps --?like Facebook -- that haven't been updated with the new photo storage paradigm in mind. Those apps will show the Recently Added album as though it were the Camera Roll, so the only way to share older photos is to create a new album and manually move the shots over.
What was once in the Camera Roll...
The Camera Roll has been around iOS since late Apple CEO Steve Jobs pulled the first-generation iPhone out of his pocket on stage in San Francisco. It was a simple concept: an infinite list of every photo you've ever taken.
Until now, nearly every interaction with photos on an iOS device was done through the Camera Roll. Showing vacation pics to your friends? Camera Roll. Choosing a selfie to upload to Facebook? Camera Roll.
...can still be found in Collections.
As of iOS 8, the Camera Roll is no more. This alarmed many users who thought their photos had disappeared following the update, but fear not --?your selfies are safe and sound.
The closest thing to the traditional Camera Roll is the Collections view, which can be found in the Photos tab at the bottom of the Photos app. Collections organizes snaps into Moments based on their capture date and the location where they were taken, which actually makes it easier to find a specific shot from the past.
Apps looking for the missing Camera roll default to Recently Added, which has caused some confusion.
The Collections view can be a bit unwieldy when looking for photos that you took recently. For that, Apple will show photos taken in the last 30 days inside a new Recently Added album in the Albums tab.
Unfortunately, this presents a problem for third-party apps --?like Facebook -- that haven't been updated with the new photo storage paradigm in mind. Those apps will show the Recently Added album as though it were the Camera Roll, so the only way to share older photos is to create a new album and manually move the shots over.
Comments
I hate change.
Apple is doomed!
Whaaaaaa whaaaaaaa !
I hate change.
Apple is doomed!
I don’t want a single thing to change without my express consent. I like things just the way they are. And it’s too bad Apple doesn’t innovate anymore either.
I don’t want a single thing to change without my express consent. I like things just the way they are. And it’s too bad Apple doesn’t innovate anymore either.
Simple words, but "change" isn't necessarily "innovation"...
More to the point, neither is necessarily "improvement".
Too early to tell with this, perhaps?
I was concerned when my camera roll had disappeared, and I've been keeping up to date on iOS 8 changes pretty well.
The great unwashed are going to freak, and I frankly don't blame them. People may not know where or when a picture they want was taken, and if you don't know that, finding it is a bitch.
Countdown to rollback... 3,2,1...
My money is on this being changed within weeks if not days.
I was concerned when my camera roll had disappeared, and I've been keeping up to date on iOS 8 changes pretty well.
The great unwashed are going to freak, and I frankly don't blame them. People may not know where or when a picture they want was taken, and if you don't know that, finding it is a bitch.
Countdown to rollback... 3,2,1...
I really hope you're right.
I am trying, really trying, to be patient with this, but between the bizarre way that old photos are cached in purgatory (try walking your 70 y/o parent through this) and the fact that you can not even move a folder higher up that you reference frequently, that lack of user autonomy with this is really bizarre. I'm really concerned that iPhoto is going to be an even bigger cluster### when the new OS rolls out.
If anyone at Apple is reading about this, I hope they consider bringing back the camera roll as a start. Being able to better organzie folders, and also have the option to not have slo-mo, pano, video, etc all stuck in separate folders would be great as well. My photos list of folders is ridiculous. They may as well start sorting Square format, B and W and color into their own folders for all the logic this has behind it.
What? Facebook hasn't kept their app(s) up to date with changes that they were warned about months in advance? I'm *shocked*. /s
Well, unfortunately, iWork apps behave like the Facebook app. They only show the images in "Recently Added" and these apps were already updated with "Support for iOS 8".
The photos tab sorts everything by dates, but, it includes every photo synced through iTunes. If I want to find a photo I took a year ago with my iPhone, I now don't have a choice but to sort through a mix of camera-made photos, downloaded photos and iTunes-synced photos, which in my case include 14 different albums. I fail to see how an app developer is going to easily solve that.
What's the point of having a choice between albums and "collections/moments" in the photos tab if the line is ripped out in between them? Functional design goes out the window with this move and it's very un-Apple like. At the very least put a toggle in setting to allow us to include different time frames to define "recent" in recently added, so that maybe we can tell it to include everything added to the phone, as with the camera.
Or bring the Camera Roll back.
And I've now had every coworker of mine send them feedback since apple is unlikely to read this...
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
The photos tab sorts everything by dates, but, it includes every photo synced through iTunes. If I want to find a photo I took a year ago with my iPhone, I now don't have a choice but to sort through a mix of camera-made photos, downloaded photos and iTunes-synced photos, which in my case include 14 different albums. I fail to see how an app developer is going to easily solve that.
What's the point of having a choice between albums and "collections/moments" in the photos tab if the line is ripped out in between them? Functional design goes out the window with this move and it's very un-Apple like. At the very least put a toggle in setting to allow us to include different time frames to define "recent" in recently added, so that maybe we can tell it to include everything added to the phone, as with the camera.
Or bring the Camera Roll back.
And I've now had every coworker of mine send them feedback since apple is unlikely to read this...
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Where did the "My Photo Stream" Album come from? I don't have any shared photos anymore. How do you fix that? Thought this article might help, but nope.
Makes no sense to remove the camera roll...
My money is on this being changed within weeks if not days.
I was concerned when my camera roll had disappeared, and I've been keeping up to date on iOS 8 changes pretty well.
The great unwashed are going to freak, and I frankly don't blame them. People may not know where or when a picture they want was taken, and if you don't know that, finding it is a bitch.
Countdown to rollback... 3,2,1...
Explain to me how what you said makes any sense. If someone can't find their picture in a chronologically organized "Collections" view how were they finding those same pictures in the old chronologically organized "Camera Roll" listing?
Explain to me how what you said makes any sense. If someone can't find their picture in a chronologically organized "Collections" view how were they finding those same pictures in the old chronologically organized "Camera Roll" listing?
Because the new method mixes synced photos with phone-generated ones. My old Camera Roll had around 200 photos, and I had about 3,000 synced photos. I can navigate the synced photos via Albums and Events, but to find a photo I took > 30 days ago, I have to dig through 3,200 photos.
Because the new method mixes synced photos with phone-generated ones. My old Camera Roll had around 200 photos, and I had about 3,000 synced photos. I can navigate the synced photos via Albums and Events, but to find a photo I took > 30 days ago, I have to dig through 3,200 photos.
Ah, I get it. I don't have photosynching turned on. "Photos taken with this device" should be a smart folder (or whatever they call it) within Collections. I suspect Apple will do something like that, but not undo the whole change.
Because, maybe, they don't remember when a photo was taken/added to their camera roll.
Right, but that was true before this change too. The merger of local photos and shared photos was the complicating factor that I wasn't getting.
Where is the old Photo Stream? Is Photo Stream co-mingled with Recently Added? If I wish to remove selective photos from Photo Stream, how do I know which photos those are?
I guess I should read the manual or the helpful tips provided in the Photos app.