No date showing in gallery when scrolling through photos

I figured this out — in ios26 if you have the “reduce transparency” turned on in the accessibility settings then the photos scrolling dates don’t show up (presumably a white on white problem) — once you disable that setting you are back to normal (and yes your notifications are harder to read in the glass theme thing — to help with that you can keep “reduce transparency” off but enable “increase contrast”)

Here is what worked for me.

Go to:

Settings

Acessibility

Per-App Settings (2nd from bottom)

App Customization

Add App (click & scroll to Photos)

Click ">" in newly added Photos

Scroll to Reduce Transparancy and select OFF

That fixed it for me by eliminating the white area at the top and allowing me to see the WHITE text that says "Library" and the date that changes as you scroll photos. Good Luck and complain to Apple. So far ios 26 gets a thumbs down from me. Let them know what you think Feedback - Photos - Apple

We are not Apple; folks who read these posts are just users like you. We can't know "why" Apple does what they do. Some of us hang around here from time to time in case our experience may help someone. We don't get paid and we don't have a schedule, and the Apple engineers don’t read the stuff, here. Leaving an angry post won't encourage us to offer help. 

You can enter a date in the search field and get the pictures taken on that date.

If you would like to make suggestions to Apple, go here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

Here's a hint: Remember that the person who reads your post probably is in no way connected with the cause of your rant. ALL CAPS and multiple !!!s won't help.

chesterflaps wrote:

It does show the latest photos first but no date appears anywhere on the screen whilst scrolling.

I see nothing under the word library at the bottom left.

Where are you looking? I'm looking at the main Library view, where the word Library is at the top left in large bold letters and no words appear at the bottom. When I scroll around, the date of the top photos shows at the top of the screen (in smaller letters just below "Library") while I'm actively scrolling and for a second or two afterwards (unless I hit the bottom, in which case it disappears immediately).

What I see on my phone (iPhone 17 Pro Max, iOS 26.0 (23A345)) does half of what you said you wanted ("scroll through my photo gallery and at the top of the screen it would show the date range of the photos I was looking at") -- it shows only a single date, which seems to be the start date.

What I see on my phone is that the date of the earliest photos shown appears while you are scrolling through your library, but it may switch to another message if you pause scrolling for more than a second or two. (In my case, the message is about syncing items with iCloud.) What do you see up under the word "Library"?

Ah great! I was not aware of the "per app setting" in accessibility. I don't like the glass look at all so now I am able to turn on the reduce transparency setting across the phone and just leave it off for the photos app. Cheers

Oops, pushed the wrong button…

If you scroll to earlier photos, does the top stay that blank on the left? That's definitely not normal.

Thanks a lot. It works fine

Excellent!! Thanks!!