There is an ongoing but infrequent Photos bug that some iPhone users have been experiencing since upgrading to iOS 18. The issue occurs when attempting to save edits on an image, with users seeing the following message: "There was an error saving this photo. Please try again later."
As the message suggests, edits are not able to be saved, and hitting "Cancel" and discarding changes is the only way to get out of the editing interface.
A lot of the complaints about the problem have been from users who have an iPhone 16 model, but it also appears to be impacting some older iPhones as well. We've run into this bug several times at MacRumors, and it seems to be impacting every version of iOS 18 to date.
Reports about the bug started in September, and have continued since then. Most recently, several beta testers running iOS 18.2 have reported seeing the popup. It is worth noting that this is an error that some people ran into before iOS 18, but it appears to be much more frequent now.
It's not clear what's causing the problem, and it does not seem to impact all users or even every photo. It could be linked to Live Photos, or it could be an issue with iCloud Photos. Some users have all photos from a specific day bugged, indicating a problem with photo capture or saving.
There is no complete fix, but duplicating a broken image with a "still photo" allows the edits to be saved, but it removes Live Photo and Photographic Styles. Apple is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.
