Someday soon you will wake up to a new Apple Photos on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Never mind that Photos has been updated every year since it replaced iPhoto in 2015. This is different. Like the people from Extreme Makeover snuck into your Mac overnight and did a full remodel. This year you are excused from expressions of shock and uncertainty. At first glance, it’s a lot.

But bear with me. There’s so much to love here.

First of all, keep in mind that the basic layout and navigation of Apple photo apps has remained pretty much the same all the way back to the introduction of iPhoto in 2002. Since Apple Photos replaced it almost 10 years ago, we’ve managed the annual refresh cycle with few hiccups. Finding our pictures has become a familiar task that we hardly think about anymore.

A swipe here. A tap there.

Ohmygod, it’s Uncle Milton!

But the thing is that our photo collections have grown from thousands of pics to tens of thousands. Swiping through months of images is a big task. Organizing and tagging all those pictures is even bigger. And picking through the minefield of utility photos - receipts, QR codes, documents, grocery items, etc. - is tedious and slow.

Photography has become integrated with our lives in ways that traditional photo management thinking just doesn’t address.

The other thing is that the older you get, the less important a timeline becomes. As an organizational and historical foundation, it’s fine, but when it comes to how we actually find random photos day-to-day, it falls apart. We’re more likely to associate an image with a person, place, or circumstance than be able to dredge up a date range from 30 years ago.

When trying to connect to a lifetime’s worth of memories, we need to find them more by how we think than by how they’re stored.

Which appears to be what Apple is doing in the new version of Photos.

Overall, the new interface does two great things. It reduces the number of clicks to get around (i.e. Albums, Memories, Photos Home Screen, and so on) and it adds Collections as kind of a visual wild card; semi-custom categories that sit between the Apple generated groups and Albums.

And all of this is displayed on one page, with thumbnail previews of each button’s contents. Think of going to a website landing page with everything you need to know on one long page as opposed to the old style website with layers of links and pages to sift through. That’s the idea, and I quite like it.

And if that wasn’t good enough, the page is customizable. If you don’t like the order of the sections, you can reorder them. Or remove them altogether. Let’s say you never look at Media Types. Just hide it.

As of now, these collections include:

• Recent Days

• Albums

• People & Pets

• Pinned Collections

• Shared Albums

• Memories

• Trips

• Featured Photos

• Media Types

• Utilities

• Wallpaper Suggestions

No more section tabs like Library, For You, Albums, and Search. It’s all there on the main screen, so instead of scrolling forever through the All Photos tab, you will be scrolling much less to the collection that most quickly gets you to your photos.

And by the way, one of the niftiest additions is the Recent Days (which you CAN remember) collection that replaces the old Recents tab and offers up a quick view of the last couple weeks of individual days (it is actually an infinite scroll of every individual day in your library). Perfect for quick access to your most recent photos.

As cool as all this is, Apple has another trick up its sleeve.

Coming later this fall, Apple will be adding Apple Intelligence to your Photos search capabilities. The promise being that even the flexibility offered by Collections might be eclipsed on the fly by a Siri request or complex search entry.

It’s a lot. Arguably the biggest change to Apple Photos since its launch.

So here’s the thing.

This upgrade (macOS Sequoia, iOS/iPadOS 18) for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad launched to the public yesterday. As with all upgrades, prudence suggests that waiting a couple weeks to install is good advice. You just turn off any Automatic Updates in your Settings panel and continue on. Having said that, I haven’t run into any issues running the public Beta software, but I can only speak to my setup.

Also, there is a lot to get excited about but also a lot to learn. The new Apple Photos will certainly change how we manage our photos and videos and who knows what features are coming that wait to be discovered.

Be a part of the journey.

Please share your experience with the Apple Photos update! Join the chat and tell us what you like, don’t like, and would like to see. Software updates like this are when we can influence the development process. I will share any remarkable comments with the Apple feedback forum. This is your chance to be a part of the process!

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