I had been on the iOS 18 public beta, so when the general release came out and everyone was howling about how bad the new iOS Photos app design is, I had already gotten used to it, and didn’t think get what the big deal was. But, I just had an experience that has changed my mind about how abjectly terrible this UI is. It’s also partly my own fault, though.
I’m currently on vacation in Lisbon (lovely place so far, you should visit if you can), and I went for a short walk yesterday with my Fujifilm X100T I mention that because the camera is old, and doesn’t have built-in geotagging (well, it does, but it’s not easily enabled). Also, as usual, I forgot to adjust the camera to the local time zone when I arrived in Portugal. With those two easily correctable things in mind, I imported the 30 or so photos I took during that walk into Photos app.
First UI fail: an easy way to select the group of images you just imported. It’s there, but it’s sorted by oldest first, which, for me, starts in 2011, and there are almost 33k images there. I can’t find a way to sort by newest import, which seems like a basic bit of functionality, and it would have taken me forever to scroll to the bottom of that list just by swiping on the screen. Yes, there is a little scroll grabber on the very far right of the screen that appears while scrolling, but it’s invisible against the white background of the Photos app’s UI.
Anyway, I then saw the “Recently Saved” collection in the sidebar, and there were the images that I just imported. I hit “select” then “select all”; then the three dots menu on the lower right, to adjust the location of those images. I was happy to just put “Lisbon” in there; I don’t need those photos to have granular location data, just to know I took them in Portugal.
Second UI fail: I tapped “adjust” and got no feedback, confirmation, or any indication that anything was happening. In fact, I thought nothing was happening, so I went to adjust it again, and that was when I realized my error: I didn’t notice that there were over twenty-seven thousand images in that group, the oldest of which was imported in 2017. I mean… I guess that’s “recent”… it’s more recent than, say 2007, when the first iPhone was introduced; and it’s definitely more recent than Samuel Morse’s first morse code transmission in 1838. But in the context of my trip, I wouldn’t exactly call 2017 “recent”.
But, back to my story. In hindsight, the lack of response made sense, given the huge number of images being adjusted. With a growing sense of panic, I started poking around the Photos app, but realized that there is no way to undo that action for all twenty-seven thousand images as a batch. It is possible to restore an image’s original location data, and that is to select each image, hit adjust in the little map area, and then tap “revert”, but it only works on one image at a time.
I realize this might be a pretty niche scenario - ie. importing images into Photos on an iPad from a memory card, and needing to change the time and location of those images. But damn, there should really be an easier way to ensure you’re just dealing with that specific group of images.
Lightroom (which is what I normally use for dealing with importing RAW images, by the way) has a pretty sensible “Imports” section in its sidebar that groups imports based on when you imported them, and by default, is sorted by most recent import.
So why did I decide to import to Photos rather than Lightroom this time? Who’s to say? I have no explanation. It’s kind of arbitrary, but in general, I guess I use Lightroom when I think I might want to spend more time editing my photos, and Photos is for everything else. So I picked Photos this time.
There’s a glimmer of hope in the form of an app called Metapho, which allows for the editing of photo metadata, and it’s available on iOS and macOS. If I’m lucky, it will help me revert this clusterfuck for the 27,229 images in my library that were not, in fact, taken in Lisbon.
