With iOS 18, Apple rebuilt the Photos app to give it a new visual appearance and a unified layout that changed how people used to navigate the app in the past. While AI-powered features such as Clean Up might take center stage, the new Photos app on iOS 18 has many other things to offer.
Sometimes, you give your iPhone to a friend or someone else for various reasons. Maybe they just want to make a phone call or check out stuff on your phone. But with that also comes the anxiety that the other person might land on your private photos or, even worse, share them to their device.
This is where a couple of new options baked into the Photos app might come to the rescue. They can give you an idea of whether someone peeked through your photos or AirDroped them to their device. Here's what you need to do:
- Make sure your supported iPhone is updated to iOS 18.
- Open the Photos app and scroll to the "Utilities" collection.
- Tap the "Utilities" header or swipe through the options to find the "Recently Shared" album.
- The Recently Shared album lists all the photos and videos AirDroped from your device or shared to other apps like WhatsApp in recent days.
The Recently Shared album provides helpful insight into which photos and videos were shared. While the album includes AirDroped content, it doesn't put a label to differentiate them from pictures and videos shared via other apps. The media you save to the Files app from Photos will also appear in the album.
Furthermore, photos and videos shared to WhatsApp (or some other app) only appear in this album if shared through the Photos app. In other words, if someone takes your phone, opens WhatsApp, and uploads a photo, it won't show up in the Recently Shared album.
However, If you find a photo or video you didn't share, you can try to retrace the steps by checking individual apps for clues. So, if the media doesn't appear in a messaging app, there is a chance the other user AirDroped it.
You will find another album in the Utilities section called "Recently Viewed." This album does what its name says: If someone took your phone and viewed your photos or videos even from years ago, they will show up in this album.
This is how you can monitor what's happening in the Photos app on your iPhone. Speaking of which, iOS 18 also lets you delete super-long videos from your iCloud Photos storage and free up some valuable space.
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