Photo Tools is an all-in-one customization tweak for the Photos app

It feels like the Photos app continues to become more cluttered with features that everyday users really don’t even use in every major iteration of iOS. At least for me, I find myself really only ever using the Albums view in the Photos app to get to my most important stuff. I don’t ever really utilize the People or Places albums, nor do I ever use the Memories or Shared tabs.

For anyone who feels like they’re in a similar boat and miss the simplicity of the Photos app as a simple album-based Photo Library viewer, a new free jailbreak tweak called Photo Tools by Justin Petkovic might be able to give you exactly what you’re looking for.

Compatible with all versions of iOS, from iOS 7 to 10, Photo Tools is a great way to clean up the Photos app UI by removing extraneous features that you might never use. It comes with a bevy of settings that you can configure to match your own personal tastes, whether you agree with me in the aforementioned scenario or not.

Below, you can see just how much we’ve been able to simplify the Photos app by hiding the features we really never use:

To set the tweak up, you can visit the new preferences pane that gets added to the Settings app:

Here, you will find options for all of the following:

  • Hiding the “People” album
  • Hiding the “Places” album
  • Hiding the album photo count
  • Hiding cover photos for each of your albums
  • Hiding the search function from the photo grid view
  • Enabling a way to select all of your photos in the photo grid view
  • Enabling a way to swipe to select multiple photos in the photo grid view
  • Hiding the “Shared” tab from the tab bar
  • Hiding the “Memories” tab from the tab bar
  • Increasing the maximum zoom-in limit for photographs
  • Skipping the deletion confirmation you usually see when deleting media
  • Hiding photos from the “Recently Deleted” album

A respring button is also provided for your convenience, and it’s recommended that you use it any time you change any of these settings.

In particular, I feel that enabling the new selection features in the Photos app while you’re in grid view make this tweak work it. The additional features that let you hide the bells and whistles that I can honestly say I really never use are just a bonus that help minimalists like me from pulling our hair out.

Overall, Photo Tools is a pretty solid release, as it lets you take full control of your Photos app and customize it so that you can use it in any way you want to. Even if you’re a fan of  the features that I think are extraneous, you can still use the tweak for a number of other things instead, as the screenshot above of all the settings you can tinker with pretty much speaks for itself.

Photo Tools can be downloaded completely free of cost from Cydia’s BigBoss repository, and as we noted earlier, it works on all jailbroken devices running iOS 7 or later (even iOS 10).

Will you be taking Photo Tools for a spin? Share in the comments below!