Apple's serious about photography but this doesn't mean the way it handles images on iOS devices is seamlessly intuitive to everyone -- so here's ten top tips to improve how you handle photos on your iPad or iPhone.

Photos and Albums

The two main options for navigating iOS 8 photos are slightly different:

Photos offers a variety of different views including: Years, Collections, Moments and a Map view.

Albums shows the default collections: Recently Added, Favorites, Panoramas, Videos, Hidden, Recently Deleted and any albums you've created on your device or shared with iPhoto on your Mac.

Hide photos and videos

You can hide photos and videos taken on your iOS 8 device. To do so, tap and hold the image in question and choose "Hide" from the contextual menu that appears. The image will disappear from the standard "Photos" view, but will still be visible in Albums. Be warned, third-party apps such as Flickr will still auto-upload your images if you have that setting enabled.

Immediate edit

When you take an image you can edit it immediately within the Photos app -- just tap "Edit" and you will be able to crop, rotate, adjust light and color and use filters, including those from third party apps.

Delete

This needs frequent explaining. In the olden days of iOS 7, when you deleted an image the image was really deleted. The new version of Photos adds a "Recently Deleted" folder into which deleted images are quarantined for 30-days before disappearing completely. That's great if you accidentally delete an image (when you can "Recover" it), but to really delete an image from your device you should delete in the normal way and then enter the Recently Deleted folder to delete that image once and for all.

Search

Tap the magnifying glass icon and your can search all of you photos by date, time, location or album name -- type November to get all the images you may have captured of riots at your local mall last Black Friday, for example.

Editing iCloud images

You can edit images that you don't have on your device but do have available in iCloud. To edit the image you will need to Duplicate it on your device first. You will end up owning both the edited (on the device) and non-edited (iCloud) image.

iCloud Photo Library

Once enabled in Settings on your device, iCloud Photo Library lets you store and share every image you take using iCloud, up to your available storage space. Images stored in iCloud are searchable by date, time, location, album name and other criteria.

Shared albums

Images held in your iCloud are private, but can be shared. Select those images you wish to share and choose "iCloud Photo Sharing". You will create a shared album to which you can invite up to 100 of your friends. Once you create a shared album you can add (or delete) subscribers and assign posting privileges by toggling the "Subscribers can post" setting (hopefully you'll get more granular control in later versions).

Added tip

There is one more thing (thanks to Petri Sirkkala) -- you are limited to sharing 100 folders, so don't create a new shared folder for each event. (And think about the complexity of navigating so many folders on a device).

Web albums

Shared albums can be published as a Public Website in the Sharing frames, just toggle Public Website to on. You can then get the link which you can share with others (and others can share elsewhere).

Saving to iCloud Drive

Once signed into your iCloud Drive account then any third-party apps that support it will let you open and save documents to it, you can also navigate through available files.

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