Fix Photos App Redesign in iOS 18 by Rearranging Collections

The iOS 18 software update has been popular for iPhone users thanks to the addition of some great new features that allow for more Home Screen customizations, Dark Mode icons, icon tinting, and Control Center customizations. But if there’s one thing that has seemed to be the focus of complaints with iOS 18, it is the Photos app.

Photos app got a dramatic redesign in iOS 18, and a fair amount of iPhone users wish they could undo these changes and revert back to the prior Photos app design. While you can’t quite do that, you can make some adjustments to the Photos app that will help it behave closer to it did before the confusing redesign in iOS 18. One of the best improvements you can make is to simply change the Photos ordering to sort by recently added instead of capture/creation date, but there are even more customizations you can make that will further improve the Photos app experience and better suit it to how you use the Photos app.

These tricks are aimed at adjusting Photos app in iOS 18 on iPhone, but work the same on Photos app in iPadOS 18 on iPad too. There seem to be less complaints about the Photos app on iPad however, perhaps because the larger screen doesn’t make the redesign so awkward or confusing, or because there’s simply not several billion iPad users as there are for iPhone.

How to Rearrange Photos App in iOS 18 to Fix the Redesign

Apple seemed to anticipate some to be bothered by the iOS 18 Photos app redesign, because they added a mostly hidden setting where you can customize and reorder the Photos app to better suit your individual preferences. Here is how to access this, and to make the Photos redesign work better for you:

1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone
2. Scroll to the very bottom of Photos app, at the very bottom, tap on the “Customize and Reorder” button



3. At the “Customize and Reorder” screen, tap the blue checks to deselect collections you want to hide from Photos app, and also you can tap and drag the collections to change the order of how they appear in Photos app. For many iPhone users, moving the ‘Albums’ collection view to the top is helpful, along with other collections they were frequently accessing before



4. When finished, tap the (X) button to close and return to Photos app to see your freshly reorganized Photos app

Reverting iOS 18 Photos Redesign Closer to iOS 17 Photos App

Using the same trick as above to rearrange the Photos app, you can sort of mimic the Photos app for iOS 17 by hiding all the other Collections:

1. From Photos app, scroll down to access “Customize and Reorder” as before
2. Deselect all collections, except for ‘Utilities’, ‘Media Types’, and ‘Albums’, then drag and reorder that trio of collections to your preference
3. Tap (X) when done

Making this change to move ‘Utilities’ and ‘Media Types’ to be more prominent, while hiding all the other unwanted ‘Collections’, can more closely mimic the prior Photos app design experience.

Remember, Use ‘Sort by Recently Added’ to Get the Old Photos Camera Roll Style Sorting Back

Another very helpful trick is to use the “Sort by Recently Added” in Photos for iOS 18 option in the Photos library, so that any new photos or videos that have been added to your device – whether transferred via AirDrop from someone else, or saved from Messages, or saved from the web – will appear at the bottom of the Photos App Library, similar to the default Camera Roll setting that had been in place since the beginning of the Photos app existence.

We recently covered this one and it’s super easy to implement; scroll up a bit in Photos app to see the reverse arrow icon in the bottom left corner, where you can tap on that and change the sorting.

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Do you have any other recommendations or tips for customizing the Photos app in iOS 18 so that it feels more like it did in Photos app for iOS 17? Do you like or dislike the Photos app redesign on iPhone with iOS 18? Share your experiences, thoughts, and comments below!