Selective Photo Sharing

For obvious reasons, apps have never been able to dig through your iPhone photo library without your explicit permission, but like most iOS privacy features, once you’ve granted them this permission, they get carte blanche access to the whole thing, which not only exposes your photos, but could provide a wealth of other information, such as pulling your location history from on the EXIF data that’s stored in your photos that indicates where they were originally taken.

Fortunately, in iOS 14 you no longer have to give apps the keys to the kingdom when it comes to your photo library, since a new “selective” photo sharing option will let you pick individual photos to expose to an app, giving it access to only those selected images, and nothing else.

In the early betas of iOS 14, this is a little bit clunky, since once you’ve granted that access, apps won’t necessarily request additional permissions if you attempt to share photos again right away — you have to go into the system Privacy settings to change it — although once a certain amount of time has elapsed since the app last accessed your photo library, iOS 14 will present a prompt the next time you attempt to share a photo giving you an opportunity to make different selections.

There’s also a new “Add Photos Only” privacy setting that you can take advantage of for apps that simply need to save photos to your photo library but don’t ever need to read them.