Videos Will Look Better in the Photos App

iOS 18 introduced many new features to old apps, but the Photos app received the biggest redesign.

Love it or hate it, the Photos app now has a different layout that puts everything on a single screen. While that alone has caused some discussion among users, one thing that no one liked was how video playback looked.

In iOS 18.0 and iOS 18.1, opening a video in the Photos app shows it smaller, surrounded by thick, black borders and controls on all sides.

You can tap the screen to expand it if you want, but users feel that’s unnecessary most of the time, as you probably just want to view the video and not the options menu. It also makes it extremely awkward to access the scrubbing bar to navigate through a video, as it disappears in full-screen and only returns when you tap again to bring the controls back (and shrink the video).

Fortunately, Apple listened, and starting in iOS 18.2, videos will automatically go to full-screen mode without having to be tapped a second time. If you want to share, favorite, or edit the video, you’ll need to tap the screen again, but you won’t have to see the black, unnecessary borders.