Photos (Apple)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Photos, Apple's photo management and editing application, will find a picture if you simply describe it. Type "cat in a box" into its search bar, and the app returns that exact image. It sorts that photo out from thousands of others, without a single tag or folder. That kind of natural language search did not exist when the app first appeared. Apple bundled it quietly onto the iPhone, years before anyone called it a photo library. Getting here took more than software updates. Apple discontinued two applications that a devoted user base depended on. It asked millions of people to accept a replacement whether they wanted it or not. What did those users lose in that shift, and what has Photos become since it was allowed to fully replace them?

• 2. Retiring iPhoto And Aperture

  ›

  In June 2014, Apple told customers it would discontinue both iPhoto and Aperture, its two existing photo programs. They would be replaced by a single new application called Photos. That replacement arrived within a year. Photos shipped bundled with the OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 update, released free to Mac users on the 8th of April 2015. It stepped directly into the roles both iPhoto and Aperture had filled.

  On the iPhone, though, the app had already existed for years by that point. Apple had included it as a bundled program in iPhone OS 1, the software that shipped with the very first iPhone.

  On the 13th of September 2016, Apple carried Photos onto a third kind of device, adding it to tvOS 10 for the Apple TV. Photos reached a fourth platform after Apple unveiled the Vision Pro headset at WWDC on the 5th of June 2023. The app came to visionOS alongside it. None of those platform additions matched the scale of the change still to come in 2024.

• 3. The 2024 Redesign

  ›

  At WWDC in 2024, Apple gave Photos on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 what it called its biggest feature update since the app was introduced. Apple's stated goal was to improve usability, simplify how the library was organized, and add new intelligent features built on Apple Intelligence.

  Before the update, the app split photos across separate tabs labeled Library, Albums, and For You. That structure disappeared in favor of one continuous, scrollable view. Opening the app now shows the full library first, arranged in a compact grid. Scrolling further surfaces collections the app builds on its own, grouped by theme: people, pets, locations, or events. Users can customize, sort, or pin any of those collections individually.

  A phrase like "Me with ice cream" is now enough for the redesigned search to return the matching photo, with no tagging required. Video was included too, and the search can identify a specific scene inside a video, not just the file as a whole.

  A new tool called Clean Up can remove a distracting object from a photo with a single tap. A separate feature builds a memory, a short compilation of photos and videos, from nothing more than a simple typed description. That intelligence layer sits on top of an organizing system the app has followed since its very first versions. That system was built long before Apple Intelligence existed.

• 4. Organized By Moment

  ›

  Apple designed Photos to be less complex than Aperture, the professional-grade program it replaced.

  Through version 4.0, which shipped with macOS 10.14 Mojave, the app grouped photos into a "moment." That cluster was built by combining a photo's timestamp with its location data.

  Version 5.0 arrived in 2019 with macOS 10.15 Catalina and dropped that structure. From that point on, photos could instead be browsed by year, month, or day.

  By default, an iPhone saves its photos in the HEIF format, short for High Efficiency Image File, using a .heic file extension. HEIF trades some compatibility for efficiency: its files are smaller and hold more quality than an equivalent JPEG. JPEG, in turn, works across a wider range of older devices and software. A HEIF photo can still be exported as a JPEG file whenever that wider compatibility matters.

  A one-click auto-enhance button sits at the center of Photos' editing tools, delivering a strong result without manual adjustment. None of those edits, though, were guaranteed to stay on just the device where a user made them.

• 5. Across Every Device

  ›

  iCloud Photo Library keeps a user's photos and videos synced across every Apple device they designate, whether a Mac, an iPhone, or an iPad. Edits and even album structures carry across those devices automatically. That integration is optional, but it sits far more centrally in Photos than it ever did in iPhoto.

  Sharing a photo digitally was only ever half of what the app offered users. For years, there was also a way to turn a photo into something physical.

• 6. The End Of Printing

  ›

  Photos initially offered professional printing services inherited from its predecessors. A user could turn a photo into a book or a calendar and have it mailed to an address. Apple added its own new options too, including square print sizes and the ability to print a panorama.

  In July 2018, a pop-up message inside the app told users that Apple was discontinuing those printing services. The message asked that any final orders be placed by the 30th of September 2018. That shutdown, at least, came with several months of warning built into a pop-up message. Not every change to Photos gave users that same courtesy.

• 7. A Backlash From Power Users

  ›

  Critics singled out one loss of functionality compared to Photos' predecessors. Photos could no longer group images into user-defined Events; instead, photos fell automatically into chronological Moments or had to be placed into albums by hand.

  Albums themselves did not support automatic sorting. Getting that back required building a Smart Album with custom, user-defined rules, an extra step iPhoto and Aperture had never demanded.

  Aperture's own users were especially frustrated, since Apple had abandoned that application entirely once Photos launched, taking a set of professional-standard tools down with it.

  Some of those users found the change more than frustrating. Anyone who upgraded to OS X El Capitan in 2015 without installing the latest version of iPhoto was locked out of that program, without warning. Apple had already pulled iPhoto from the Mac App Store by then. Photos was the only application left to open.