Discussed recently on ATP[1] - this is a huge security hole. If you give access to all photos, apparently the app can search through the EXIF data to extract locations and timestamps, and build up a very accurate timeline of your whereabouts.

1: https://atp.fm/542

I wish Apple stripped sensitive metadata from photos by default when interacting with third party apps/sites. The few services that actually need this data could request an additional permission.

As an app developer I don’t want users to send me location metadata with their photos, but there’s no easy way to communicate this to non-technical users.

Is it though?

If you want Google Photos to back up your photo library… it needs full access to everything to do that.

Very very few apps should need full photo access. But photo backups/cloud libraries are the one I can think of that do.

I was actually surprised no one on ATP brought that up.

Ok but what if you don’t want to use Google Photos for that?

Genuine question: what else does it do? I thought that was all it was for.

Answered upthread:

> view photos already saved in the cloud

Seems weird that an app needs to be able to tell if it got access to all or just some photos

Almost as bad is the FLIR app. You have to give it permission to view all photos, or else it won't let you save a photo. iOS specifically has an API that allows saving photos without photo access.

That's incorrect, I just tried it on iOS.

When you open it, it defaults to the "Photos" tab which has a message (not a dialog) asking for all photos access. But if you switch to any other tab (like Search or Library) you've got access to all of your photos in the cloud.

On the one hand you wouldn't realize that if you never tried tapping another tab. But on the other hand, the main "Photos" tab is designed to access all of your local photos and show whether or not they're backed up. Most (although not all) people are probably using Google Photos for this (to save local photos to the cloud), so it at least makes some sense for it to be the main tab with a prominent request.

It’s partially correct. I installed the Google Photos app with the intention of sharing some photos from my phone to a shared album. As far as I can tell, it is not possible to give Google Photos access to a limited selection of photos. The app just tells you to go back and give access to all photos.

You can access all your cloud photos without granting access to any local photos -- that was the main point.

Yes you're correct that there's no way to give access to only selected local photos, but that permission also doesn't really make sense for the app. Its main purpose is to back up all of your photos automatically.

If you want to upload individual photos just do it directly from photos.google.com. It's a single click. There's no reason to install the app at all.

Just checked and it appears they’ve fixed this. For years it would occupy the entire screen and not permit accessing any other tabs. (You can find threads from last year discussing this).

However they still don’t offer a way to upload specific photos, and if you attempt to share only selected photos in the ios settings app they detect that this isn’t all photos.

Those tabs are new as of a few months ago.

Here's a screenshot [1] showing how the permissions prompt originally blocked you from navigating to the other tabs, and some additional reports of the issue [2] [3]. What's worse is that very old versions of the app worked fine in view-only mode without these invasive permissions demands, but then Google decided to update the app to be completely useless unless you surrendered all your photos.

I'm surprised Apple allowed the app on their store for over a year, with what appeared to be a clear violation of their policies.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/l2sErQQ

[2] https://support.google.com/photos/thread/1939628/use-ios-goo...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/rhoyb1/google...

This shouldn't have even been possible. iOS should have never given apps a way to tell whether they've been denied permissions to any photos. From their perspective, it should just look like you don't have any photos if you deny them all.

Agreed, so obnoxious, especially since as you say the OS has a “select some photos” permission setting that they should be able to play nice with.