Can’t search photo albums in iOS 18

I have about three thousand albums, many left over from iPhoto-created Events that I later gave meaningful names. Counting private and shared libraries, I have over a hundred thousand photos and a few videos.

Three weeks after moving the library onto my iPhone 16 with iOS 18, many (but not all) of my albums can be located by name with the search function. My MacBook Pro running Sequoia finds approximately the same number of folders per search, but not necessarily the same ones.

Seems the newest Photos library search engine can take an inordinate amount of time to build the tables necessary to locate things.

It's fairly easy to, just scroll down to pinned collections and tap modify . that will take you to this page where you can add albums . after that albums will be in pinned collections .

It often happens that users with many albums may notice that some albums appear to be missing when searching by name. However, if you browse through the gallery manually, you’ll find the missing album. If you don’t have many albums, this issue is less likely to occur.

ios18 photo app search mode is a serious downgrade. As someone who heavily uses photos app as well as the iPhone camera my album traces back to 2014 via iCloud and has over 50,000+ photos and videos. The fact that when I search people now or essential things in our outside my home I get on average no results. Things like “plants” “pizza” “guitars” and a persons name it shows me on average 0 or at most 28 when I have hundreds that use to come up on any prior OS.

about to revert back to 17.7

_merigan wrote: … Things like “plants” “pizza” “guitars” and a persons name it shows me on average 0 or at most 28 when I have hundreds that use to come up on any prior OS.

Again, I don't think that it's the iOS. All those things work for me on iOS 18. It's not a bad idea to revert to an earlier OS and see if it makes a difference. Let us know…

CORRECTION:

It appears the "Search" function is available, but only when you're looking at the default (Home page) of the photos app (all your photos).

But if you try to add a selected photo or photos to an album there's no "search" or "alphabetical order" option to find the album (you have to scroll through every album to add that photo??)

NOT User friendly or innovative. A needed option.

Exactly… No search function and no way to alphabetize except manually, renders a large number of photo albums useless for those of us who use it a lot. I was already frustrated that I couldn’t search my albums while within a lot of Apple features as well as 3rd party apps, but now I can’t even use my work around… which was to locate an album via IOS search and duplicate a photo so I can find it right there at the top of recent photos, when in 3rd party apps, such as Facebook. That in itself was time-consuming and frustrating but at least I could do it!! Argh

I had this issue as well and after searching a lot i finally found the solution, click on photos , pinned collections, modify and you select album and add it to your collection.

the answer is in this thread , just scroll down to pinned collections , modify and you will find an option to add your albums . after that they will be there in pinned .

It’s pretty clear that Apple hired 10-year-old to write iOS 18 and they didn’t test anything. as a longtime iPhone user, I will say without any hesitation whatsoever that this is the absolute worst version of iOS to have ever been released.

Same for me, in the gallery, iOS 18 can’t search by album, which means it’s not user-friendly. What’s the point if you can’t search by album and have to go through each one manually? It’s not user-friendly at all.

Exactly. Losing the ability to search by album name has rendered the photo app very useless.

Who would do that? Was there not a design review? A re-design review?

They took something really simple and made the layout noisy and the whole thing a complete mess.

It can find like 1% of my albums, but the rest it cannot.

Changing just for the sake of changing is nonsense.

Same to me. I am a doctor and I can no longer find a photo by a specific date or by the name of the disease that I registered before. This is terrible and has messed up my life and I hope it is a temporary error in the application. I hope they fix this problem soon.