If my dog can send me photos then I'll enter it on America's Got Talent. Or maybe it will be smart enough to enter itself.

Or did you mean a photo of a dog? In which case I assume you mean the use of tags. Photos don't tag themselves and until image analysis technology is good enough to auto tag photos then organising through folders is good enough for me. For any application that deals with collections of stuff (music/photos/etc) the use of folders as an organisation aid has got to be the most fundamental requirement. After you got that sorted then go for the fancy stuff like tags and artificial semantic reasoning and deduction logic etc.

But it doesn't remember the last folder used. Each time the photos app is started it defaults to displaying ALL images and I have to go through at least 7 clicks to be able to even start choosing the folder of photos that I want to view which are stored on my SD card.

Last time I checked I have designed and implemented precisely zero UIs. I hope you're not suggesting that I need to have done so before I can criticise a UI or express my preference to what a UI should and should not do/have?