IOS5 "Albums" - Bait and Switch?

[RKO (NMC)]

This is kind of surreal. Am I the only IOS5 user to notice that the emperor has no clothes? There was a lot of preliminary excitement before IOS5 actually rolled out about the introduction of the long-awaited feature to create photo albums right on the iPhone. There has always been an Album feature (at least for as long as I have had an iPhone), but it was really a lame feature because the albums had to be created and modified on the computer and then transferred to the iPhone. Albums could only be displayed on the device; pictures could not be added, deleted, sorted, renamed or modified in any way. Even my ancient Motorola phone allowed me to create and manage albums on the device, so this was a huge hole in the iPhone feature set.

Supposedly this hole would be addressed in IOS5. But that did not happen. There IS a new feature that (confusingly) uses the term "album" but it is actually something much different. The "albums" that are created with this feature are nothing like the existing iPhone albums, which are standalone copies of pictures that are stored separately from the temporary Camera Roll.

This new "album" feature is just a primitive way of sorting the Camera Roll. When you add a picture to an album it is not preserved in a separate location like the existing albums. And you cannot use the "Add to Album" feature to add a photo to an existing Album. The new "album" is just a subset of the Camera Roll. When you delete the picture from the Camera Roll, it disappears from the album! So if you want to keep albums on your iPhone to show to people, you have to let the contents of your Camera Roll grow indefinitely. If you could rename or sort the pictures within the album to tell a coherent story, that might be useful. But you can't even do that. And I gather that the album structure you create on the phone isn't preserved when pictures are transferred off the phone.

I was really hoping for the ability to create albums like the existing albums, but more manageable. I want to be able to rename, sort, add and delete pictures, just like my old Motorola phone. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

I think this is the biggest disappointment of the IOS5 release. Am I the only one? Why isn't anyone talking about this?

[Matthew T]

So is it the albums you are talking about ???


Sent from iPhone

[melissa]

I agree with you. I was also looking forward to being able to put pictures in their own albums. I have to take a lot of photos for work and send them to the home office. Maybe they will fix this in a future update...