Can’t search photo albums in iOS 18

It often happens that users with many albums may notice that some albums appear to be missing when searching by name. However, if you browse through the gallery manually, you’ll find the missing album. If you don’t have many albums, this issue is less likely to occur.

I have hundreds of albums organized for my work with their respective titles. I would use search to locate the album I needed. I just upgraded to the iPhone 16 max with iOS 18 and the search function will NOT include albums. I have to literally scroll through hundreds of albums to find the one I’m looking for. This is so inefficient for my work 😭. Has anyone found a solution? TY!

Below procedure worked for me so try this:

“The detection process requires iPhone to be locked and connected to power. Depending on what tasks are running in the background and the size of your photo library, the process could happen quickly or take up to a few days to complete”

I was wirelessly charging my iPhone 16 Pro for over 2 weeks and the photo search function still wasn’t working. After coming accross the above information, I used my usbc charging cable and physically charged the phone overnight twice in a row, the search function started working the next morning. So I guess the phone does require to be physically connected to power in order for the phone to learn your large photo library. Hope this helps.

How can? Do i have to wait for my photos to be fully optimized?

I have stored data and named substansive volume s of albums by name with tag numbers.

Before search by an album name was possible such as album xxx NO.1, album xxx NO.2,album xxx NO.3 etc...

I dont understand why album indexing, has been remove from IOS 17.7.

This lack of functionality makes me consider return the smartphone, it make the photo album application useless.

I dont need AI or fancy function to search albums, or limit the search to individual picture, the concept of album naming is to find them all by keyword, make it simple and efficient.

Yes. It’s bloody horrible. I’m looking for a third party App for my photos. They can’t be any worse. Why does Apple always have to stuff thing up when they are working well. If it ain’t broke leave it alone.

Mine ended up taking 3 to 4 days to completely índex (?)

At first it would find only a few albums, the next day it would find more, but not in any order I could discern, though it did seem to index the albums with real word names before the ones named with my shorthand.

Since then it has worked fine and can find every album

if you have a massive amount of albums it may just take a while?

I am an iPhone photographer and we are also influencers and I organized all my photos and videos in Albums. How insane is it that they took away the feature to search for an Album by name?

This is so unacceptable and disappointing that Apple would release an IOS that is a downgrade. Aren't they reviewing and testing their IOS before release?

What's going on? I just hung up with tech support who indicated that now with this IOS 18 the videos are looping.

SOS - Apple - I hope you are reading this fix these problems NOW!

Works for me

It's fairly easy to, just scroll down to pinned collections and tap modify . that will take you to this page where you can add albums . after that albums will be in pinned collections .

they cant withdraw a such a major utilty without prior notice

You need to rename your album (just add . for the last word) it really takes time but it work for me, i have like 500 hundreds of Album