Do normal people really use albums? Other than the autogenerated ones I have a single one, from 2013.

Nailed it. Using albums is the engineer’s answer to what is technically best. In the real world it doesn’t work because nobody knows how to, much less actually uses albums. And even if you do, what are the chances you have an album with exactly the photos you want to share? So you’ve got to select the pics you want anyway, but now you’ve also got to create an album first to put them in. It just adds to the work and confused and irritates people.

Yes they do. People who value the curation of their photos will take the time to do it. I create an album for any event etc. which I expect I'll want to photograph. It's easier to share and re-share the same set of photos, and it acts like a log of cool stuff.

Also, I don't have to scroll through months of memes to get to that one good photo I took in July 2017... or was it August..... maybe it was 2016......... shit.

> People who value the curation of their photos will take the time to do it.

Sounds like only something people who aren’t stressed from their underpaid jobs can do? Most people are kept busy and don’t have time to fit into this dark (corporate app) pattern.

If you're underpaid you should probably ask yourself if you need an expensive smartphone...

Plenty of people use photography as an escape from their work stress. I just don't understand what your point is.

The argument is that many corporate apps upload things without the user's consent or prior knowledge (revealed here by iOS 14 [1]).

Your post was in my eyes saying this issue was up to individual users to tackle. I disagree with that. I think it is instead the governments' role to regulate and reel in predatory and parasitic corporations.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/06/25/tiktok-sto...

My wife is not in a tech related industry, so I consider her "normal," and yes, she does use albums.

She has albums for work stuff. She has albums for home decorating ideas. She has albums for the various screenshots she collects of things she wants to remember. She has albums for different places she's been.

I know that the people she's friends with use albums because I've heard it mentioned.

I think normal people use albums. Tech people don't. Which explains why a company like Apple, that tries hard to court normal people, not tech people, has them.

I, like probably a lot of iOS users, don't have any albums. I just have the Camera Roll, which contains several years of my life history.

I've had an iPhone for years. I didn't even know albums existed. I've just noticed the tab in Photos when I went looking for it after reading your comment. And it turns out, I do have one other album already, with a couple of photos in it, though I have no idea why or whether I created the album or how the photos got there or what purpose it serves.

When it comes to security features, simple and obvious behaviour is good, pretty much always. The same is true of user interface design, and the lack of both documentation and natural discoverability on iOS has always been a pretty glaring weakness of the platform. Complexity creates edge cases, and edge cases create vulnerabilities, including due to misunderstandings and resulting human error.

Judging by the other replies to the parent comment, apparently I'm not alone here, so I'm guessing if Apple did any user research about this, that "big debate" probably lasted a few seconds...

Agreed. The semantics should be like <input type=file> and let me pick one or more each time.

I take a lot of photos and I use the album feature a lot. But when I am going to for example post a photo to Instagram I don’t at all want to have to put the photo in a dedicated Instagram album just so I can post it. That is to say, one mans “obvious solution” can be another mans annoyance.

Nailed it. That must be it :-)