The bad one, which is used e. g. by Instagram will show me hundreds of useless folders which I think are remnants of the old iPhoto library that was one day transformed into the new Photos library.
Does anybody know how to either get the Instagram app to use the proper photo picker or how to get rid of these „folders“? Because somewhere in there are also the correct folders that I actually use in my Photos library. It’s just almost impossible to find them within all that junk.
I’d focus on figuring out where those empty albums are located, and then get rid of them. According to the screenshot, you have 49,952 albums! Either something has created huge amounts of albums (possibly in the move from iPhoto to Photos or perhaps some sort of automatic album creation), or you have corruption in your data that is leading Instagram’s photo picker to think you have many (empty) albums.
Have you looked for these albums in Photos? I think this is easier to do on a computer. If you use iCloud Photos, you could do this on a Mac that’s signed into your Apple ID or log into iCloud.com. Check all of the folders (and subfolders) under Albums and Projects.
If you find the albums, you should be able to delete them.
If you don’t find the albums, then some sort of corruption may be the problem. If you have a Mac, I’d try repairing the Photos library:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that you can do any repairs on iCloud.com or on the iPhone.
That screen shot doesn’t look at all like the current version of Instagram on my iPhone running iOS 16. Over here, I see exactly the same photo picker in Instagram as I do in Apple’s own apps.
Unfortunately the repair feature didn’t help.
I think all those „albums“ are some remnant of the old iPhotos style of sorting pictures. Not albums I created myself but e. g. all photos made on one day.
As long as I use the proper photo picker (like in Apples own apps) it’s all fine. It’s just a few third party apps like Instagram (I’ve seen it with others as well, but not all of them) that they somehow can’t access the correct presentation of the data.
Well, that’s a bummer that repairing didn’t change anything with those mysterious empty albums. You could very well be right that it came from the iPhoto era, but I’d still be concerned that something is wrong with your Photos database. Tracking it down may be impossible without the help of Apple.
If it were me, I’d try to contactApple tech support to see if the problem could be elevated to the engineers, just so they’re aware. But I probably wouldn’t waste too much more time on it — and instead focus on having good backups. In this case, I’d also make sure I had the originals securely stored, just in case something irrevocable happens to the database.
I agree with @KVZ - are you certain you’re running an up to date version of Instagram? Because your photo menu doesn’t look the same as mine, and Katie’s noted it’s not the same as hers either.
You’ve also presented an assumption that it’s Photos that is presenting false info, rather than an error in Instagram itself. Since it seems not to be the current version of Instagram I’m inclined to believe the fault lies with that app rather than Photos, unless you’re experiencing it with other apps too.
So, assuming Instagram is up to date and/or the fault is presenting with other apps too, my preference at this stage would be to contact Apple Support. I had a blip a while back where iCloud (not the Photos app itself) was reporting that I had 800+ photos when I only had ~120 photos. As is often the case with Apple, it was a syncing issue that was giving a false read or something, and Apple gave it a kick which sorted it.
It’s the current version of the Instagram app and experienced it with other apps as well – I just don’t remember which they were right now, Insta is the one the where I happen to see it frequently.
I assume it comes from iPhoto because as far as I investigated, it all concerns older pictures.
