bcj

poster emeritus

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If you choose to limit the photos an app has access to, you have to do it by selecting each photo individually. iOS photos have albums but you can't say "only this album". It tricks you into thinking you can but if you select an album it then says "have fun clicking all the photos in this. have fun editing the setting any time you update that album

I used to think the most annoying album-based ommision on iOS was a lack of album shuffle but that makes sense—apple hates having music and wants use to use their streaming service. This is a newish privacy setting they're clearly proud of and yet they have made the workflow useless enough that I just give everything photo access


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in reply to @bcj's post:

I think the expectation here is: every time you want to (for example) post a photo to social media, you just go in via the “select photo” UI and grant access to the one specific photo that you want to post.

Why the heck would I want to give an app an entire album? Just give it the whole library if you're that indiscriminate, or only give it the photos it needs otherwise, I don't see why you'd stop in the middle

Also album shuffle is terrible, I'm mildly offended, but also the top two buttons when I open an album are play and shuffle, is that not the case for you?

When you're playing an album you can also open the track list view in the lower right corner and then there's shuffle, loop/loop single, and an infinity button which I assume would autoplay Genius-suggested tracks once you hit the end of the album? Those toggles are also sticky, if you pick a track from another album later it'll shuffle that album once that track is done.

in what world is an album indiscriminate? It's a set of photos that I specifically chose. If I wanted to grant a few apps to a specific set of photos it would make way more sense to make an album to manage what photos they see than having to manually select photos for each app. In my specific use case, I want to share some photos on Instagram and Instagram really only allows multi-photo upload from their app. So I have a folder of photos synced from my computer and I would like Instagram to have access to that and nothing else. The lack of album support means I'd either need to go into settings to change things every time or give them cart blanche. Both of these seem like pretty standard use case.

The album shuffle I want is the "shuffle by album" that the desktop app has that selects albums in a random order and then plays the songs in the selected album in order

Ohhh actually that would be cool on album shuffle, that's fair. I would expect one of the many third party music apps could offer that, it looks like Longplay has it, lots of people love that one, though it is a few bucks. Should just be built in I agree.

I dunno, I see where you're coming from a little better, it's just a weird use case. Is Instagram making you select the photos again? Because this feature is meant to be used each time you need more photos, as I understand it even if you did have an easy album select you'd have to select it again if you added photos to the album, because Instagram just gets the photos as a one time operation, it doesn't learn anything about how they're organized or have a way to request updates. The path Apple engineers are imagining is that you open the picker, you're already in the album, and you just select the new ones you've made since the last time.

Well, hopefully we're just in a weird transition period on that and the more private picker is slowly given more power to fit use cases like yours, Apple should be and probably is looking for more functionality so that 99% of apps won't get full library access anymore.