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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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