Smartphone gallery apps are a pain.
Like having a mosquito at a picnic - persistent, annoying, and always showing up when you're just trying to enjoy your sandwich.
I've been working on a couple of commissions lately. As always, I upload the most representative work to whatever gallery app comes with the smartphone. Right now, that is Google Photos on Android. I also use it for private photos. And each time, I end up stunned by how utterly crappy it is. All of them are. Well, all except one.
This has been going on for many years now, and except for more or less valuable gimmicks, all the ones I tested use the same old feature set that became a standard. God knows why. All pictures stay in the camera folder, even if you file them into an album. That's counterintuitive and fills up your camera folder. You lose an overview of the photos that have been filed and those that didn't.
When you set the albums to show as a list and sorted alphabetically, once you go to the camera and want to add photos to an album, the albums show in a grid and not alphabetically. There's no way to change that in that view. You spend time looking for the correct album, and there is also no way to search for a specific one.
These gallery apps have had an unfriendly, counterintuitive UI for ages. We've come to a point where I have to admit that Apple Photos on the Mac and iOS are much better and less jerky to use than Google Photos and others.
And that's saying something because Apple Photos has its share of annoyances. It is frustrating to see companies like Google spending billions on enshittification instead of re-inventing an app millions use.
Does a non-shitty, practical, and intelligent gallery app exist at all?