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Comment by ajconway | Hacker News Reader

On iOS is't possible to ask the system to present a photo picker on behalf of the app without requiring a permission to look into your photos.

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So I’ve heard about this feature before but I’m not sure it actually exists? From the Photos app you can only share specific photos with specific apps that add themselves to the popout menu. If you disable Photos access to any of these apps they will just ask that you re-enable full photo access.

It does exist, I have an app that manipulates photos and if you reject photos permission you can still use the photo picker and get access to one photo of the user's choice. You can't directly save to the photos library, but you can save it via a system share sheet.

Most apps don't make that obvious though, and imply that they need full photos access to work (Or they don't give options to use the system picker/system share sheet.)

I'm not an iOS developer but if it does exist not many apps use it. Snapchat, MS Teams, Discord, and a few others don't do it by default at least.

Apple really should force their hand and mandate that this is the only way to get a photo upload. I hate all the sweeping permissions nearly every app for iOS demands. Where's the sandboxing?

I just checked with Teams, when you click on the image it brings up the image picker.

The iOS-native UI is not customizable, that should be the main reason.

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