Comment by jamwil
1 year ago
iOS already has exactly the experience you describe and it clearly urges you toward sharing only specific photos.
The only feature request I have is to be able to scope app permissions to an album, since the current flow of selecting individual photos adds a lot of friction.
Unfortunately, no. It allows you to select which photos an app has access to, and I doubt anybody uses it more than once because of how many taps it takes to include a new photo. Unless I'm missing something.
> It allows you to select which photos an app has access to
Yeah, that's the "limited access" mode but if the app uses the system photo picker[0], the app doesn't need any photos permission to pick a photo. Blame the app developers for not updating their apps (and this has been available since 2021 - they have no excuse.)
> Apps don’t need to request photo library permission when using either class, so the sample app avoids requesting permission until it’s necessary. A camera app, photo editing app, or library browsing app needs to use much more of PhotoKit‘s functionality, but [[an app that’s only setting a basic profile photo doesn’t need photo library permission]].
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/selecting...
Meta: You know, the user might accidentally pick "all photos" and then we get to hoover their photo roll up.
The argument for the walled garden is that Apple should be taking these options away from the developer in favor of user security. Yes, blame the developer, but also blame Apple.
1 reply →
You're right, I think a better UX would have been to let me select which photos I want to use like a normal camera roll picker and to just automatically make that photo available to the app requesting it rather than me having to first go and approve which photos to make selectable and then going to select it after.
That’s exactly what OP asked for. To select which photos an app has access to using the system picker so they can’t see the whole camera roll.
No. I want to select photos the app has access to now. I don’t want to readjust my selection every time I want to upload a new photo. What I want is an upload button like in the browser.
I click “add photo”, the system dialog opens, I select a photo, and then that gets sent to the app. Somehow, Apple managed to screw that up.
4 replies →
That's what I do. Works great. Yes a couple of extra clicks is annoying, and apps are often "Hey how about you go into settings and let me access all your photos for a better experience!", but I'm happy with 2 or 3 extra clicks the few times a month I share a photo in order to limit access.
I use it every time. The alternative is to give Meta access to your whole photo roll, which… they will obviously abuse, whatever toggles you set, right?
It isn’t so bad, but I don’t upload much.
I use it explicitly for Facebook
[dead]
Well, no. It keeps giving permission to the app, and it’s a lot of clicks to manage.
It shouldn’t give access at all, but use a secure clipboard implementation so that only that app can read it out exactly once.
Whether you share it once or in perpetuity is of no practical consequence. They already have the photo at that point.
I agree about the clicks—the UX should be one-shot select and share with the permissions handled implicitly.
It’s about permissions to read out the photo album to begin with, as well as due to it being a pain to change often leading to whole selections of photos being shared
No, they (and I) want it to work like the web browser file upload component where you don't need to grant permission ahead of time because it's nonsensical.
Imagine if every time you wanted to upload a file online, you first had to allow the one website to access that image first in one menu before you could select the image in the normal file upload menu. That's the UX they're complaining about.
But you don’t have to do it ahead of time. When you click add photo, you get the system picker to choose the photo and once you’ve selected what you wanna grant access to, that’s it. Literally not a single menu needs to be opened, nothing needs to be configured.
Any UX other than this is something the app developer has implemented on top. iOS works exactly like you described.
You're not understanding the complaint or you have Full Access turned on without realizing it.
Set an app like WhatsApp to No Access or Limited Access.
Now try to upload a photo into chat.
Instead of just presenting you with all of your photos so that you can upload one, you first have to click "Manage" -> "Select more photos" -> "Add the photo".
Now you can select that one photo for upload.
That could obviously be trimmed up into Grant + Upload in a single operation, but instead it's so clunky that people grant Full Access just to avoid it.
It doesn't make much UX sense since I want to push one image into the app one time, while priv granting is for future pull operations that don't make sense 99% of the time.
4 replies →
Something like "allow app access to last photo" would be ideal for me
Why?
If they have access to the last photo ... every photo you ever took was the last photo. Why mess around giving app's permission to surveil/siphon off your photos at all?
Any carte blanche for apps, and apps will go to great lengths to take advantage of that in unexpected ways, and obscure the fact they are doing so.
And privacy losses can never be verifiably reversed.
All most apps need is for you to select photos to upload/import using an Apple supplied photo selector. So they only see and get exactly what you want them to have.
I’m presuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the app only gets access to your last photo when the photo picker is launched. It wouldn’t be able to slurp up every photo in the background.
Even android has it!