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Matt Elliott/CNET
Do you miss scrolling through your Camera Roll? I do. With iOS 8, Apple removed the default Camera Roll album that housed all of the photos and videos on your iPhone and replaced it the Recently Added album that lets you view only photos and videos from the last 30 days. To browse through photos older than 30 days that you haven’t already put in an album, iOS 8 forces you to use the Years, Collections, and Moments views and their tiny thumbnails and the dead space between groupings of photos. I want to scroll through the consistent grid of just large-enough thumbnails on my old Camera Roll.
iOS 8.1 is reportedly scheduled to be released on October 20, which along with the debut of Apple Pay is rumored to include the return of the Camera Roll. Until then, there’s My Camera Roll, an app that mimics the Camera Roll you’ve come to know and love for 99 cents.
My Camera Roll doesn’t add an album to the Photos app; it operates independently. The app opens to a grid of thumbnails of all of your photos (but not videos) and provides the same editing and sharing options as you get with the Photos app.
While the editing and sharing features are exact replicas of what you get with the Photos app, My Camera Roll opens the grid of thumbnails at the wrong end. Instead of opening at the bottom of the grid where your most recent photos reside, it opens at the top with your oldest photos, forcing you to scroll down to your latest shots. If you keep the app open, it remembers where you last left off, but if you close the app, you’ll begin again at the top of your photos with your oldest photos. It would be much more helpful if the default started you with your most recent photos at the bottom like the Photos app does.
Thankfully, a fix is in the works. The developer said the next update will fix this issue and default to starting you at the bottom, along with introducing a Today screen widget that will let you view your photos on the Today screen of Notification Center.
For more on the other changes iOS 8 introduced to the Photos app, check out how and where to find your photos in iOS 8 and how to set up photo-editing extensions.
