Apple Photos on the iPhone: Part 2 - The Collections View
SEARCHING FOR SPARKY
Memories are a wonderfully untidy thing.
You would never file that picture of Sparky next to one of the neighborhood coffee shop that gives him treats on the morning walk. Or with the pictures of the local beach where he’s played with other dogs. Or the car he’s ridden in so many times. Not to mention all the photos of your kids who lobbied passionately for a dog in the first place. You wouldn’t know how to find that picture if you wanted it.
Yet in our minds, every one of those connections is immediate and a reminder of our experiences with Sparky. We will never walk that beach without thinking of him, however fleeting a thought that might be.
Ideally, since photos are the bookmarks of our memories, photo organizing should be the same; elegantly cross-connected and offer infinite pathways to the image we seek. While we’re not there yet, the Collections page in Apple Photos for iOS 26 gets us a step closer.
As we saw in Part 1, Apple has split Apple Photos on mobile into two pages - Library and Collections. The bottom menu bar lets you choose which one to use.
Library is the chronological display of all our photos in a time sequence from oldest to newest. It is orderly and familiar. If we are looking for recent photos or know a specific time period to browse, it works just fine. Where it falters, though, is if the time frame is unknown or you want to find several photos from throughout the Library. That process is tedious and time consuming. Like digging through a month of newspapers to find a recipe. So if we have to pick one universal spot to save a picture, it’s going to be when the picture was taken.
But that’s not the way our memory works. Sure, time frame is one part of that, but only to the extent that something happened before or after some other thing.
Which is why metadata - captions, location, people tags, keywords, etc. - has become so important for photo management. It adds memory friendly context.
Collections is where context lives.
The Collections page makes finding photos easier by reducing your choices to context-based Collections. Skimming through just the Food Section of the last month’s newspapers will get you to that recipe much faster than scouring each complete paper.
Even ‘Recent Days,’ which is a time-based Collection, streamlines your task by compartmentalizing your choices to a specific day.
Collections come in 3 flavors:
Photos Created
User Assisted
User Created
Photos Created Collections are built into Apple Photos and include the aforementioned Recent Days, as well as Featured Photos, Trips, Map, 15 different Media Types (Videos, Selfies, Portrait, Screenshots, and so on), and Utilities Collections that use object recognition and machine learning to identify image content like QR Codes, pictures of Documents, and Illustrations as well as certain activity groups like Imports, and Recently Viewed/Saved/Edited/Shared photos. Wallpaper Suggestions round out the list. Photos Created Collections are dynamic and constantly update to include additions and deletions from the Library.
User Assisted Collections include People & Pets, Favorites, and Memories, although Memories can go both ways; Photos generated and User generated. In this case you are giving the collection guidance by naming people or tagging Favorites. Photos uses that to find the people, events, and to create the Memories movies.
User Created Collections include Albums and Shared Albums. The traditional alternative to the Library view where users get to create their own curated Collections for enjoyment and sharing.
The key takeaway here is that Apple has devoted as much attention - more actually - to the Collections page as to the venerable Library page. In iOS 17 and earlier one had to deliberately go through the menu tabs to find most of these collections, if they existed at all. For ease of use and space allocation, the extra stuff was out of sight.
Now, with OS 26, Apple is showcasing the next generation of photo management with all the goodies highly visible and easy to get to. It’s all here, spread out on the page with clear labels and large thumbnail icons. One imagines their next step as offering EITHER Library or Collections as the default view when you open the Photos app.
Customization.
And the power play is that the Collections page is customizable. Not so much as last year’s introduction view, but highly attractive.
First, you can reorder the Collections.
Maybe you only ever find a picture using People & Pets or Recent Days. You can move those right to the top of the list. And if you never look at Featured Photos, Wallpaper, or Media Types, you can slide those to the bottom and collapse the thumbnail view.
Second, you can cherry pick the Collections you use most and add them to the Pinned Collection. It can be a specific Album of yours, a Person, or something like Map. Whatever you find on the Collections page can also be added to the Pinned Collection and put right at the top of the page where it’s just a tap away.
Looked at from 20,000 feet, it’s clear that Apple sees Collections as the answer to years of doomscrolling through the Library. With the help of Object Recognition, Machine Learning, Apple Intelligence, and more sophisticated tech, Apple wants to make your photo experience more enjoyable and efficient in the era of 50k+ libraries. Adding Collections like Recently Viewed and Recently Shared just cuts to the chase when finding current photos and videos.
Random scrolling through all your photos to find one is a common complaint by users of all photo management apps, and one of the reasons people want to offload old and second-tier images to narrow their searches. Collections effectively does that without the hassle of managing multiple libraries and missing out on your whole memory bank in one place. With a little practice the Collections page can become your go-to way to find and collect photos for viewing, sharing, and project creation.
Which brings up a key point.
One image viewed in many places.
Even though the Library page and Collections page are separate views, they display the same set of images. Nothing ‘moves’ from one page to the other. In the same way that TV streaming services show you action, romance, new releases, movies, and let you make your own list, Collections are just a convenient way to let Photos show narrow your view to a certain selection.
If you find a photo in Recent Days and delete it, you aren’t just deleting it from Recent Days on the Collections page, you aren’t deleting it from your whole Library and all the devices you are syncing via iCloud. The exceptions are Albums, Memory Movies, and Shared Albums that you created. In those cases you can remove the photos from that Collection without deleting them altogether.
So what about Sparky?
Even though Sparky appears randomly throughout the Photos Library, it’s a certainty that he will show up in multiple Collections because of all the relationships he has with events and family life. ‘Sparky through the years’ is a likely Memory Movie. As is ‘Beach Days.’ Naturally the Sparky Collection in People & Pets will happen. And we can include Sparky in the ‘Family’ Group in P&P. If we find the local coffee shop in Map, there’s Sparky begging a treat from the barista. Cute.
Which is to say that the newly featured page of Collections is kind of a gateway exercise into the world of Search. Where “Sparky at the beach in Cape Cod last summer” is a natural and simple photo request.
The way we think.
Without the scroll.
Now is the time to start finding your photos with Collections, adding contextual metadata, and using Albums in more creative ways. As Apple Intelligence improves, you’ll be prepared to manage your pictures in more powerful and natural ways.