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A comment on Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript. Parent comment

Re:Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript by asdaq1312512 on Friday January 05, 2024 @05:14PM (#38885720)
Ahh, I did consider PHAsset.fetchAssets but my understanding was that the method will download the file if not present locally - which wouldn't be acceptable for an app, I guess.

Do you know more? The introduction says "Retrieve asset metadata or request full asset content.", but I can't find clarification when it actually accesses full content.

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Re:Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript by alexwlchan on Saturday January 06, 2024 @03:21AM (#38889599)
Yeah, that was what I thought when I first worked with these APIs! But when you use PhotoKit, you have to explicitly opt-in to downloading files from iCloud.

AFAICT, PHAsset is only metadata. When I'm downloading the full-sized images, I use PHImageManager.requestImage() and pass in the PHAsset I'm looking at [1][2]. I know there's something similar for video, but I've never used it.

You can control the behaviour by passing a PHImageRequestOptions instance. This includes an isNetworkAccessAllowed bool which controls where Photos.app will download the file from iCloud if not present locally, and it defaults to false.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/loading_a...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/phimagema...

[3]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/phimagere...

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