In the new Photos app, you’ll notice your little iCloud profile picture in the top right-hand corner of the screen. But sometimes, you’ll see a coloured circle, like this orange one, alongside it. This basically means that your photo library on the phone isn’t fully synced to iCloud, and if you tap on it, you’ll have the option to force that sync to occur whenever you want to.

Quite often, your phone won’t sync on battery power or if it’s doing other processor-intensive tasks, but sometimes you’ll want that picture to be uploaded to the cloud straight away, particularly if you’re using a shared library. Simply pressing Sync will force your phone to sync quickly for you. It’s a really simple setting, but it’s a good one to have.

On this screen, you’ll also find other information about your library. You can change some preferences and settings here if needed, such as displaying your shared library, hidden library, or whether media like videos should autoplay when you scroll to them in your feed.

When I come off of there, the orange circle is gone because my library is now fully synchronised with iCloud Photos.

Now that iOS 18 has been released, there are so many more things your phone can do that it simply couldn’t do before. I spent my summer playing with iOS 18, and I’ve made a ton of QuickTip videos on my channel down below. But excitingly, I’ve also written my first eBook! I’ve called it 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and if you follow the link below, I promise you’ll find things you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!