Can’t search photo albums in iOS 18

Same here! I’m a home stranger and have 175,000 photos organized into albums which I now can’t find by searching by album name. How am I going to do my job, Apple???

[Edited by Moderator]

Hi, what I have noticed is that “Folders” do not return in searched but the “Albums” do.

It would be beneficial to have both Folder and Albums return.

The final example below with Asterisks returned other Albums related to Gardening not necessarily with Garden in the exact name.

How does the loss of photos app search capabilities get resolved by Apple? It’s a disaster. How do we protest/complain? Enough for me to want to move to a Samsung.

@garyfrombury I have hundreds of albums and thousands of captions/keywords, I have to pin all my albums to make them searchable?

Same here- I could not work today- destroying my business

_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…

People please check again.

Mine started working after 3 days or so post iOS 18 install.

I have a lot of albums, as most people likely do, and it appears it must have been doing some kind of indexing/cataloguing (something like that? I’m not an IT guy)

Mine works now

Check again

After a few days, I discovered that my iOS 18 gallery can search by album names, but it takes a few days for the albums to sync before they become searchable by name. Hopefully, Apple can fix this to make the syncing process faster.

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.

Ok I just found that I had the same problem but have found the answer now , open the photos app and scroll down to pinned collections , there is a modify button . Press it that will open a page where you can add albums and other catorgories back into the pinned collections enabling you to see your albums from there 👍🏻

Please explain what you mean here about indexing as I upgraded my OS a while ago and I still can't find my albums when I put in the search bar - now the only search bar that is offered - in the main library, the name of the album.

All I can say is that mine took 3 to 4 days before I could find all of my albums searching by the album name.

I mentioned indexing as it seemed like it was doing just that, sorting everything so that it could later be searched easily.

Indexing is the process by which a computer system organizes and records the locations of files and their contents to facilitate faster search and retrieval.

It took 3-4 days and then they all became searchable.

I didn’t do anything but wait.

Hope that helps.

Below procedure worked for me so try this:

“The detection process requires iPhone to be locked and connected to power. Depending on what tasks are running in the background and the size of your photo library, the process could happen quickly or take up to a few days to complete”

I was wirelessly charging my iPhone 16 Pro for over 2 weeks and the photo search function still wasn’t working. After coming accross the above information, I used my usbc charging cable and physically charged the phone overnight twice in a row, the search function started working the next morning. So I guess the phone does require to be physically connected to power in order for the phone to learn your large photo library. Hope this helps.

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