Products · Broad category
Photo apps
Raised as a usability problem by 23 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 24 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Photos scattered and disorganised after switch from iPhoto, hard to findUnreviewed
20112026- After the switch from iPhoto, photos became scattered and disorganised, hard to find2018-07-06
- Upgrading from iPhoto to Photos loses a lot of metadata2016-04-15
- Lost features the user relied on after switching from iPhoto/Aperture2016-02-05
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- Cannot delete Photos app; AirDropped files keep prompting an unwanted 'Add to Photos'2026-06-10
- Photos app syncing with iPhone fails with no informative feedback, forcing workarounds2026-04-20
- Can't sort photos and videos by size to find large ones2026-01-26
- Navigation is unintuitive; user can't easily get back to most recent photos2025-06-05
- With 10k photos stored, it is impossible to find anything2025-05-04
- Retouch tool became too slow to use for fixing scratches in photos2024-06-18
- Select all option only appears when viewing an album, not the camera roll2024-06-11
- Took over a month to download a large library, with the app being cagey about when it downloads2024-01-10
- Search and tag editing sometimes fail, needing workarounds like repeated attempts or exiting searches2023-09-27
- Low contrast makes content hard to see on some displays2023-07-30
- Esc exits full screen instead of returning to the grid view2022-06-09
- Trimming a clip in Photos is difficult with the touch interface2022-04-12
- Photo files are buried inside the library bundle, making them horrible to reach2022-01-18
- Photos app works poorly with external or network drives for large libraries2021-03-04
- Its UI is much worse than Aperture or Lightroom2020-05-22
- Can't eject external drive because background processes keep the library in use2020-05-04
- Dragging photos elsewhere is hard; copying triggers a slow export process2018-09-28
- After the switch from iPhoto, photos became scattered and disorganised, hard to find2018-07-06
- Upgrading from iPhoto to Photos loses a lot of metadata2016-04-15
- Can't figure out how to back up the library to an external disk2016-02-06
- Lost features the user relied on after switching from iPhoto/Aperture2016-02-05
- Analysis is so slow that scanning 2TB of photos would take half a month2014-11-01
- Deleting a bad photo requires deleting it in two separate places2013-05-08
- Photo Stream copies all photos onto the device, using too much storage2012-01-29
- No dashboard or skip option while adding photos, and no progress warning during slow uploads2011-01-21
- Deselecting photos is unintuitive, requiring a detour to the add photos page2011-01-21