How to Customize iOS 18’s Revamped Photos App

We’ve seen a whole host of changes ushered in with iOS 18, and the trusty Photos app is one of the programs that Apple has given a major overhaul to. You’ll notice it looks significantly different as soon as you open it up on your iPhone, after applying the latest software updates.

There’s no need to panic: All of your photos and videos are still there. However, there have been some tweaks—hopefully for the better—in how you work your way through your library.

The overhaul is nowhere near as dramatic if you’ve upgraded to macOS 15 Sequoia, by the way. On the desktop, the Photos app looks more or less the same, though you will notice some differences in the way pictures and videos are highlighted.

The new Photos look and layout

As soon as you open up the newly upgraded Photos app on your iPhone, you’ll notice the tabs at the bottom of the screen have been done away with: There’s now a unified view that combines the previous Photos, For You, and Albums tabs into one long feed. You now need to scroll down to find some of the curated collections that were previously in separate tabs.

In Apple’s words, this reorganization makes it “super easy to find photos fast,” and means “you can spend less time searching and more time enjoying your memories”—though it does take some getting used to.

You will see your most recent photos next to a Recent Days heading: Tap this to see days when you took several photos or videos, picked out by the app.

As you go down the screen, you’ll come across the familiar People & Pets (or just People) and Memories albums that Photos automatically compiles for you, based on a number of factors (including who’s in the pictures, of course). There’s also a new entry here, called Trips, which is self-explanatory—for the moment at least, it doesn’t seem possible to manually curate your trips, or edit the ones the Photos app has put together.

Keep on scrolling down and you’ll get to all of the familiar categories carried over from before: Selfies, Live Photos, Recently Deleted, and Hidden photos and videos, for example. These all work as they did in iOS 17. Below that, you finally get to the albums you’ve curated yourself—so it’s very much the pictures sorted by algorithms that are shown most prominently, by default.

You can change this order around, though, as we’ll get to below. The Search button is now up in the top-right corner, rather than being on a separate tab: You can select this to look for places, people, dates, or anything else. Finally, tapping on your Apple profile picture gives you access to a selection of settings for the app, including options for shared libraries and managing auto-play.

Customizing the iOS 18 Photos app

You can change the order of sections on screen.
Credit: Lifehacker

Your main customization options can be found by scrolling all the way through your photos and videos, right down to the bottom, and tapping on Customize & Reorder. You can then put the sections in the Photos app in any order you like (by dragging around the handles on the right), or hide them from view (via the blue checkmarks).

Somewhere in the scrolling feed of the Photos app you should also see a Pinned Collection entry. It’s like a favorites bar for your most-liked photos and videos, or the ones you want easiest access to at least. Tap Modify next to this heading, and you can choose which collections appear here, and how they’re ordered.

There is another customization option available to you: If you scroll up on the main photo and video feed, rather than scrolling down, you get to the familiar grid that shows every single image and clip in your camera roll—down at the bottom of the screen you can create groupings based on Months and Years, as you could before iOS 18 arrived.

Tap the icon showing two arrows (bottom left), then Filter, and you can choose what shows up in this view: You can restrict it to just your Favorites, for example, or just Photos or Videos. Tap View Options instead of Filter, meanwhile, and you can hide photos that have been shared with you and screenshots, as well as adjust the zoom level.

One other note: If you’re looking for the carousel feature that Apple previously announced for Photos in iOS 18, it’s been pulled (at least for now). The carousel sat right at the top of the feed of photos and videos, picking out algorithmically selected content from the main grid, and there had been complaints during beta testing that it just got in the way.