Latest iOS 5 beta brings photo album curation to devices (Updated)

If you're familiar with the notion of Albums in iPhoto (or Aperture), then you will understand why Apple has emulated that behavior in the Photos app in iOS5. Albums merely contain references/pointers to photos from other sources (e.g., Camera Roll, Photo Stream or even another album). However, an Album as defined by Apple (via iPhoto) will never be the actual source for a photo. Certainly, we would all like to be able to better organize the Camera Roll into folders, but that is not what Albums are for. Albums are great for separating out a bunch of related images that (for example) you might want to show-off later in a slideshow.

The issue for iOS device users is that not a significant number of them are familiar with the iPhoto "Album" concept -- so you no doubt are going to have lots of folks putting camera roll photos into an album and then deleting the original photos thinking that they are safely stored in the new album. This will no doubt cause Apple a lot of negative PR if they don't improve the current handling of this scenario.

Of course, if you want to curate your photos on your shipping, non-beta iPad... there's an app for that! Pholio lets you drag/drop and cut/copy/paste to create your own curated photo galleries. See http://www.brians-brain.org/pholio/.

Album curation? Really?

Great feature, but this isn't news. This was in beta 1.

This was in Beta 1.......

2nd error of the day Kelly! Rushing to get news out does not think to check the facts first

Maybe change "Camera Roll" to "All photos", then? Makes more sense from a usability perspective.

I was rather surprised to discover that this feature wasn't already part of the Photos application in the current version of iOS when I was trying to organise my pictures on my phone a few weeks ago. For a while I thought that was going nuts. Nice to hear that this functionality is being added and it can't come soon enough.

Photo Albums existed in Beta 1. This isn't new to Beta 2.

Nice, working well. I can see where keeping it in the Camera Roll would be useful. I have already used the photo stream feature to save a photo I would have otherwise lost to my quick to tap fingers.