Photon Library Gives You Tabbed Gallery View on iOS 18

The new Photos app in iOS 18 turns the entire interface into a single scrollable page with Apple automatically deciding how your media is sorted and curated. You can customize and remove Apple’s collections, but you can’t bring back the old navigation on the bottom or the filtering. Photon Library is one alternative for getting that old Photos interface back on iOS 18.

The Photos redesign in iOS 18 has been wildly unpopular. It’s not universally hated because I did find people on Reddit and Apple Discussions forums who actually like it. But an overwhelming majority is missing the old layout. Some find it too crowded and over-engineered. Some say it’s much harder to find a photo they’re looking for. Others complain about the unified scroll-focused design because they can’t quickly jump back and forth between photos and albums anymore.

The redesign is most likely here to stay and Apple isn’t rolling back the changes. Even though you can’t get the old Photos app back, you can use a third-party app like the Photon Library which mimics the Photos layout in iOS 17 and below. It’s only compatible with iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 and later versions.

Developed by LateNiteSoft, the Photon Library offers a familiar photo grid, split into four tabs: Recents, Albums, Calendar, and Favorites. The Calendar section has a helpful scrollbar for quickly jumping between selected dates. Previewing a photo gives you four shortcuts for favoriting, sharing, viewing details, or deleting it. Video previews work the same way, except the scrubber has the mute and play/pause buttons next to it.

As of now, there’s no way to search for photos or filter and reorder them. The advanced utilities like the hidden folder, map view, smart search, photo editor, or the Apple Intelligence features aren’t available here either. It’s a newly published app, currently in version 1.0.2, so the developers might add more functionality in the future. If you just need a basic photo organizer without any frills, you can download Photon Library for $4.99.

Source: App Store, Reddit, TechCrunch