How to automatically sort camera photos into separate albums on iPhone 16 Pro Max?

You can only hide the photos shared from Messages by disabling "Shared with you" in the options for "All Photos", but not the what's App photos.

There is no separate Camera roll album on iOS18. You would have to use a workaround.

• Either take your photos in a way, that they will end up automatically in one of the media kind albums, for example take all photos as Live Photos or Portrait Mode photos or 3D or RAW. I am seeing most of my photos in on of these albums. But many of these shooting modes will use a lot of extra storage.
• Or, if you are using iCloud Photos you could turn the Shared iCloud Photos Library into your Camera Roll:
  • Set up the Shared iCloud Photos Library, but share it only with yourself. See: How to use iCloud Shared Photo Library - Apple Support .
  • Set up "Sharing for the Camera" and any new photo or video you take will automatically be moved to the Shared library, right from the Camera.
  • Then enable Settings > Apps > Photos > Sharing from Camera > Automatically.
  • Now all your new photos will appear in the shared library and you can toggle between your camera Roll and the other photos by switching between the Shared Library and the personal library.

On my list of presents I would like for Santa are smart albums plus keywords. and titles for photos.

Without keywords the smart albums are less powerful.

It is ridiculous to have to duplicate our smart albums as standard albums, and to have to duplicate the titles and keywords as captions to be able to see them on our iPhone and iPad as well. iCloud is syncing our iCloud Photos Library to all devices, but we cannot see it properly on all devices. The new iPhone and iPad models should be powerful enough to show all metadata and albums or smart albums.

On a Mac, we can make "Smart Albums" in Photos that will do what you want and, really, a whole lot more. Many of us have been suggesting to Apple that they enable Smart Albums in iOS and iPadOS. It may be that Smart Albums use lots of processing power which would use battery charge and slow down a phone. Maybe they have good reasons, but maybe they could make semi-smart albums. But it won't hurt to make suggestions to Apple here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

I have…

The Photos app on iOS does have some automatic sorting by category (videos, selfies, Live, Portrait, panoramas, time-lapse, slo-mo, cinematic, screenshots, RAW, receipts, handwriting, illustrations, QR codes, documents, etc.) under Media Types and Utilities, but not by the categories you mention.

léonie wrote: …The new iPhone and iPad models should be powerful enough to show all metadata and albums or smart albums.

Well said!