This seems to increase the amount of work a user has to do in practice. I suspect most users will end up sharing the entire library. From the link above:

> There's also the entirely new option Select Photos..., which leads the user through to the Camera Roll to pick one or more images to share. It is specifically images that users can opt to share, rather than albums.

> Which then means there is an issue that the next time a user wants to post an image, they find their selection confined to solely the ones they specified before. To change that and allow all or just different images, the user has to go to Settings on their iPhone.

My wishlist for fixing photo privacy on iOS:

1) Applications don't need to ask for permission to write photos to iOS folders. These get written to a separate album ($appName or $appDeveloperName by default), e.g. if you save a photo from Twitter it gets saved to your Twitter folder.

2) Photos taken by the iPhone Camera (presumably your personal photos) get stored in a special 'Camera' folder. Apps can ask for read/write permissions specifically here. Eg a photo editing app like VSCO or Darkroom may only need read permissions to begin with, but if it also wants to in-place replace your photos with its edited photos, it'll need read+write permission as well.

3) What about apps that occasionally need access to photos (e.g. social media apps) but you don't want them to have access to everything? The solution is to implement a OS-level photo picker in iOS with a UI can't be over-ridden and which makes clear you're sharing your selected photos with $appName. And ensure apps which want access to photos have to make the user go through the OS-level photo picker.

> he solution is to implement a OS-level photo picker in iOS with a UI can't be over-ridden and which makes clear you're sharing your selected photos with $appName.

This has existed forever - in fact, for far longer than applications have had the option of requesting full access to your camera roll. Unfortunately most applications have decided they prefer to take over the experience, and provide absolutely no fallback option if you reject giving them access.

Apple really just needs to make it mandatory to present a UIImagePickerController instead of whatever "integrated experience" an app provides when permissions to the photo library are denied. That would have been a much saner solution than this abomination - I don't want Teams to have the ability to wander around my photo library just so I can share a quick snap of a whiteboard. But I don't get a choice, because denying permission just makes it throw an error message up saying it doesn't have access.

From using my app on iOS 14 it appears the way it works is based on you accessing the photos library. So it goes like this:

Initial launch - user chooses a few photos. User switches apps, and returns - the same photos are selected. User force quits app (or doesn't use app for a few days and it gets killed off) User opens app, and is then prompted whether they want to "Keep Current Selection" or "Select More Photos" the first time the app accesses the photo library in some way (I think this is based on when you do a photo permissions check, but not positive.)

#3 has existed since the iPhone added apps - UIImagePickerViewController - if you use it, you don't need photo permissions and you only get access to the photo the user selected. Most social media apps probably just skip using this because they want photos permission everywhere to do things like "post latest photo" or to show their own photo picker UI.

Select photos seems reasonable and if it's implemented right then it should be no more work than I was about to do anyway (select specific photos to share).

That is incredibly good news, thanks for the link.

That's a very good start. I hope the feedback during the beta causes those controls to evolve a little bit so that it's more straightforward to change which photos an app can access.

The choice of only allowing access to specific actual photos seems an unusual one.

I would have thought there was a big debate in Product Mgmt over this vs the more obvious allow an app access to a given album.

One presumes the sticking point came when someone took a photo out of an album. Does that mean they are explicitly removing access? I don't see it as a huge issue... maybe there is some kind of technical hurdle involved as well, otherwise the choice seems unusual

Do normal people really use albums? Other than the autogenerated ones I have a single one, from 2013.

Nailed it. Using albums is the engineer’s answer to what is technically best. In the real world it doesn’t work because nobody knows how to, much less actually uses albums. And even if you do, what are the chances you have an album with exactly the photos you want to share? So you’ve got to select the pics you want anyway, but now you’ve also got to create an album first to put them in. It just adds to the work and confused and irritates people.

Yes they do. People who value the curation of their photos will take the time to do it. I create an album for any event etc. which I expect I'll want to photograph. It's easier to share and re-share the same set of photos, and it acts like a log of cool stuff.

Also, I don't have to scroll through months of memes to get to that one good photo I took in July 2017... or was it August..... maybe it was 2016......... shit.

> People who value the curation of their photos will take the time to do it.

Sounds like only something people who aren’t stressed from their underpaid jobs can do? Most people are kept busy and don’t have time to fit into this dark (corporate app) pattern.

If you're underpaid you should probably ask yourself if you need an expensive smartphone...

Plenty of people use photography as an escape from their work stress. I just don't understand what your point is.

The argument is that many corporate apps upload things without the user's consent or prior knowledge (revealed here by iOS 14 [1]).

Your post was in my eyes saying this issue was up to individual users to tackle. I disagree with that. I think it is instead the governments' role to regulate and reel in predatory and parasitic corporations.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/06/25/tiktok-sto...

My wife is not in a tech related industry, so I consider her "normal," and yes, she does use albums.

She has albums for work stuff. She has albums for home decorating ideas. She has albums for the various screenshots she collects of things she wants to remember. She has albums for different places she's been.

I know that the people she's friends with use albums because I've heard it mentioned.

I think normal people use albums. Tech people don't. Which explains why a company like Apple, that tries hard to court normal people, not tech people, has them.

I, like probably a lot of iOS users, don't have any albums. I just have the Camera Roll, which contains several years of my life history.

I've had an iPhone for years. I didn't even know albums existed. I've just noticed the tab in Photos when I went looking for it after reading your comment. And it turns out, I do have one other album already, with a couple of photos in it, though I have no idea why or whether I created the album or how the photos got there or what purpose it serves.

When it comes to security features, simple and obvious behaviour is good, pretty much always. The same is true of user interface design, and the lack of both documentation and natural discoverability on iOS has always been a pretty glaring weakness of the platform. Complexity creates edge cases, and edge cases create vulnerabilities, including due to misunderstandings and resulting human error.

Judging by the other replies to the parent comment, apparently I'm not alone here, so I'm guessing if Apple did any user research about this, that "big debate" probably lasted a few seconds...

Agreed. The semantics should be like <input type=file> and let me pick one or more each time.

I take a lot of photos and I use the album feature a lot. But when I am going to for example post a photo to Instagram I don’t at all want to have to put the photo in a dedicated Instagram album just so I can post it. That is to say, one mans “obvious solution” can be another mans annoyance.

Nailed it. That must be it :-)