If It Ain’t Broke: How Apple Photos Lost Its Way — Part 1
by We, the Parla Music Team
by We, the Parla Music Team
Apple Photos on iOS 17 wasn’t flashy, but it worked. Millions of users had built daily habits around it — reviewing recent photos, browsing vacation albums, and reliving memories of loved ones. Unlike social media feeds, the Photos app was a personal memory archive, not a dopamine machine.
For many, it was the modern replacement for the physical photo albums we once cherished: the first steps of a child, Grandma’s last birthday, a graduation with friends you still keep in touch with. We use it to relive birthdays, trips, and the small, forgotten screenshots that mark our digital lives. No one opens the Photos app expecting it to behave like a social network. We open it to remember. The Photos app is the modern equivalent of a family photo album — an emotional archive of who we are. As Don Draper famously said in “The Wheel (Season 1, Episode 13)”:
“Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent… In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we are loved.”
That emotional weight shaped the design of iOS 17.
Apple Photos wasn’t about endless scrolling or algorithmic feeds — it was about control, predictability, and emotional resonance. That all changed with iOS18 and iOS26.
A diagram of Apple Photo iOS18 (including iOS 26) hierarchy. Notice how every section is flattened relative to the scroll view, destroying the sense of a high level hierarchy.
Image Source: Library Tab Apple Photos iOS17 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Apple Photos iOS17 - Hierarchy Diagram
|-- Library
| |-- Grid of Photos
| |-- Segment Controller (Years, Months, Days, All Photos)
|-- Albums
| |-- My albums
| |-- Shared Albums
| |-- People, pet & places
| |-- Media types
| `-- Utilities
|-- For You
| |-- Memories
| |-- Featured photos
| |-- Shared with you
| `-- Shared album activity
`-- Search
|-- Search bar
|-- Moments
|-- People & pets
|-- Places
|-- Categories
|-- Groups
`-- Recently Searched
Image Source: Scroll View Apple Photos iOS18 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Apple Photos iOS26 (iOS18) - Hierarchy Diagram
|-- Grid of Photos (Search on top navigation)
|-- Segment Controller (Years, Months, Days)
|-- Recent Days
|-- Albums
|-- People and Pets
|-- Memories
|-- Trips
|-- Shared Albums
|-- Pinned Collections
|-- Featured Photos
|-- Media Types
|-- Utilities
`-- Wallpaper Suggestions
Apple iOS17’s hierarchical structure was intuitive and deliberate:
Each tab represented a clear mental model:
Library to browse time
Albums for organization
For You for curated memories
Search for retrieval
Users had developed muscle memory: tapping “Albums” → scrolling to a favorite → viewing or editing. Everything felt predictable and under their control. Even small actions, like creating an album or favorite photos, were obvious and immediate.
iOS17 respected Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) — the foundation of good iOS design:
“Tab bars help people understand the different types of information or functionality an app provides. They also let people quickly switch between sections while preserving the current navigation state within each section.”
— Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Tab Bars
That simple rule captures why Photos 17 worked so well — you could jump between Library, Albums, or For You without losing your place. Navigation was spatial, predictable, and emotionally grounded.
Apple knew what they had in their hands. So deliberate was the old design that Apple made it explicit in their old way of marketing the iPhone’s camera and Photos ecosystem. Lets take a look at a few examples:
Video Source: Take Mine © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
In 2017’s “Take Mine” ad, a young woman visits her grandmother in a Greek village. She takes a portrait, shows it to her grandmother — and soon the whole town lines up to be photographed. It’s storytelling about connection, family, and shared joy — not technology.
Video Source: The Archives © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
In “The Archives”, an archivist sorts through boxes of old photos and film reels, assembling them into a montage that ends on the iPhone’s Memories feature. Again — emotion, not algorithms.
And the long-running “Shot on iPhone” campaign turned real user photos into billboards worldwide. Everyday moments — laughter, clouds, faces, pets — elevated through simplicity and authenticity.
The emotional appeal from Apple’s Ad is not a coincidence. They knew that the best way to market their Camera and Photos app was appealing to emotion and respect for memory.
It seems like from iOS18 on wards, Apple abandoned that emotional connection with their customers. Apple redesigned Photos around a continuous scroll, removed the clear tabbed structure, and leaned heavily on AI-generated categories like “Recent Days,” “Trips,” and “Pinned Collections.” The emphasis shifted from manual curation and nostalgia to algorithmic discovery and visual feeds.
A grid of images now dominated the main screen, encouraging endless scrolling — more Instagram, less memory archive.
Muscle memory: The old tab navigation (Library, Albums, For You, Search) was replaced with nested scrolling. Users had to relearn basic interactions.
Context: With fewer clear hierarchies, it became easy to lose track of where you were.
Emotional pacing: “Memories” and “Albums” were buried below a visually dense grid.
Manual curation: User-created albums became less visible.
Search usability: Reduced to a small icon instead of a persistent search bar.
Apple’s own HIG cautions designers against this exact experience:
“Make sure the tab bar is visible when people navigate to different sections of your app. If you hide the tab bar, people can forget which area of the app they’re in.”
— Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Navigation and Search
Yet that’s exactly what happened.
By removing the persistent navigation bar, Photos lost a sense of hierarchy — a fundamental principle Apple itself once treated as sacred.
Image Source: Search in Apple Photos iOS17 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Old version of search where the search bar was place on the top navigation bar. Keywords with facets (a count of how many for each keyword) helps the user get context. Then photos are filtered and shown.
Image Source: Search in Apple Photos iOS18 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Notice how the search bar is now on the keyboard area. Recents show up on search. Why? We don't know. That used to be a separate album. Notice how search keywords (apple calls them tokens) have been replaced by natural language queries.
Image Source: Search in Apple Photos iOS26 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Notice how information compression is dealt using overlay hierarchy. This redesign follows the principle of layering on the z-axis established by Liquid Glass. Facets were brought back to this version after briefly disappearing in iOS18. Why do we need a segment controller for photos and collections?
Apple’s HIG explicitly recommends that apps maintain clear hierarchy and use visual structure (such as tabs, titles, and font size) to orient the user. In iOS18 and 26, that clarity dissolved: the continuous scroll flattened every section, turning what used to be spatial navigation into a temporal feed. Instead of a structured mental model, users now face a blur of collections with no clear “top” or “depth.” This undermines the emotional rhythm of the Photos experience — the difference between visiting your memories intentionally and just scrolling through noise.
Image Source: Album Tabs in Apple Photos iOS17 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
User created albums in iOS17 had their own tab. There is visual structure to the albums with idea of square cards that have extra information, including image previews, titles and facets (total count in the collection). The call to action to add more custom albums is clear: one "+" button in the top navigation bar. Notice how the word Album is prominently featured to give a sense of anchor to the app.
Image Source: Album Tabs in Apple Photos iOS18 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
For iOS18, Apple decided to move user created albums to a child view (a view that is nested in the navigation) of the main scroll view for Photos. Apple added a segment controller (personal | shared | activity) to help filter the type of album you would be scanning. A list of horizontal cards give more area to the title and the facets over the image preview, incidental giving more space to scanning the text, rather than the image. The call to action is now named "create" and it is hard to distinguish it from the segment controller from an UI perspective. It is also hard to scan for the call to action since its neighbors is a three-dot button with no clear purpose.
Image Source: Album Tabs in Apple Photos iOS26 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Apple kept the child view navigation for iOS26 and decided to switch back to the "+" call to action but kept the mysteries three-dot button. The user has to tap on the button to discover its function. The segment controller is now reads as a segment controller. Apple added a bottom tab bar navigation (a that seems to work more like a segment controller) with a search button. The idea of cards are back but the text sometimes is hard to read because of the overlay effect.
Apple’s early HIG guidance emphasized “legibility through hierarchy” — using larger, bolder text for top-level navigation and lighter text for secondary content. But in iOS18 and especially iOS26, Apple’s new Liquid Glass aesthetic — with translucent panels and reduced contrast — breaks this rule. Font sizes for navigation bars, labels, and tab text have become smaller and thinner, often rendered over semi-transparent backgrounds. This shift may look modern, but it makes reading harder, especially in sunlight or for users with low vision. The iOS17 version felt almost like those manual la belling stickers we once used to annotate our albums. Clearly legible and got the point across. The new font size selection plus the liquid glass effect is almost akin to writing those labels with sparking glossy pens that make the font illegible.
We’ll dive deeper into this in the next post, where we explore accessibility and readability under Liquid Glass — and why these design choices matter for real users.
Image Source: Album Tabs in Apple Photos iOS17 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
In iOS17 font sizes together with the idea of the album card help create a sense of hierarchy and readability. Bold is used to establish visual anchors. Font sizes are used to help the user scan for additional information about the album.
Image Source: Collections in Apple Photos iOS18 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Apple changed the layout of how albums are displayed as part of the scroll view. Bold is still used to anchor visually the collections but the chevron ">" character plus the out spilling of different sizes of album cards diminishes the sense of hierarchy. This makes the app hard to scan visually. Take a look at maps, the icon is floating on top of the word "Angeles" and the font size for map makes it hard to scan and read. Similarly, small white fonts on top of images sometimes does not work because of contrast. One good example of this with a larger font is the word "Photos" on the top, its hard to read with all the photos in the background. Overall, the view seems crowded.
Image Source: Collections in Apple Photos iOS26 © Apple Inc. Used for educational illustration under fair use.
Apple abandoned the idea of the scroll and separated collections to a separate tab (segment controller?). Making Memories larger highlights that they still think the app is about emotional connections, but the albums below still look crowded. The criticism about readability due to font sizes and tint still is there: its hard to read! Liquid Glass, makes reading and scanning the text even harder. Notice the floating "Tap to create" AI Button. It seems randomly placed and makes the UI feel even more cluttered.
Apple Photos iOS17 demonstrated that design rooted in user habits and emotional needs outlasts trends. When structure and clarity are replaced by novelty and visual flair, users lose trust — and their memories lose meaning.
Apple once taught the industry that great design is invisible. With iOS18 and iOS26, even they seem to have forgotten that rule.
In the next post, we’ll look closely at:
How Apple established Human Interface Guidelines only to ignore them.
Accessibility and readability under the new framework: Liquid Glass.
Font legibility and visual hierarchy in iOS26.
References
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