Where is the new iOS 14 Photo Picker?

TidBITS Talk
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For me, the most anticipated feature of iOS 14, its crowning jewel, was going to be the new, searchable Photo Picker. Any of you with huge photos libraries and who like to find and share random photos from the past know how that is effectively impossible from an iPhone. Unless I’m willing to scroll through 100,000 photos to find the one I want to share, I need to be able to search based on Keyword, Date, Place, or some combination of metadata.

The photo picker we have had up until now has been unsearchable, and the only relief from a completely flat stream of photos to scroll through has been Albums, that almost no one uses anymore. iOS 14 was supposed to fix that.

And it turns out that it’s available in Mail, Messages, Notes, and presumable all the Apple apps, which is great. Here’s what it looks like in Mail:

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And lots of 3rd party apps like YouTube, Dropbox, LinkedIN, Twitter, Reverb, Chrome, Google Photos, Gmail, Amazon, and OfferUp have it working. Google Hangouts also has it, hiding behind an icon. But some of the apps I most need this feature for: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp still leave me the old, lame, nearly-useless photo picker:

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Since all these are owned by Facebook, do they have some policy (or laziness) that is preventing this from being adopted? I thought they were just using a built-in API that would be automatically upgraded in iOS 14. I tried deleting the FB app and reinstalling it, in case there were something that needed re-initializing to fix this, but no dice.

Does anyone else have any insight into what’s going on here?

1 Like
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Have they been updated since iOS 14 shipped? That’s the main thing I’d look for. But it could just be laziness or incompetence on Facebook’s part too.

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Yes, all three were updated in the last week.

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But perhaps they’re still working on consuming iOS 14 APIs. Maybe they need better funding. :joy:

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They’re too busy trying to stamp out QAnon to do any development. Which, in the scheme of things, I think I approve of. :-)

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If that’s the case, I can wait. I’ll give them another week LOL.

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Incidentally, I couldn’t wait :slight_smile:

A friend shared a video of himself playing guitar, and asked me to return the favor (we used to jam together). I was using FB on my iOS 14 iPhone. Here’s how it went down:

  1. I had previously put the “guitar” keyword in some videos of myself, so I was able to use the Photos APP to find a couple videos that were buried deep in my photo library (and which, therefore, I would not have been able to find by scrolling through FB’s lousy photo picker.

  2. But lousy though it is, FB’s photo picker has one feature: the ability to select an “Album”. So I used the Photos app’s Share -> Add to Album feature to place this video into a new album.

  3. I then went back to FB to create a post and add a video. When I went to select the newly created album, it was not there. Restarting all the apps didn’t refresh this.

  4. Curious, I added a random photo into this same new album and tried to share that on FB the same way. This time, the album showed up. Some simple troubleshooting revealed that the iOS FB app did not want me to be able to post a video in a reply. This was confusing because:

a) it allows photos, not videos
b) the iOS FB app lets me post videos in top-level message (not replies)
c) the FB site on the Mac / Safari does let me post videos in replies (not just top-level messages)

So this is yet another layer of FB annoyingness (<-- yes I just created this word, and they deserve it).

And it raises the question of whether the problem will still exist when or if FB ever implements the modern, searchable photo picker: will they still block videos in mobile replies?

Why do they have to make life so friggin difficult?? This has to be the most well-funded and certainly the most popular app on the entire planet.