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.

On Organization...

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.

The Shift: iOS18 and Beyond

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.

What Was Lost

• 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.

Hierarchy Lost

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.

A Note on Font Legibility

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.