I am developing an iPhone/iPad photo processing app on a Mac using Swift in XCode 13.4. When I connect an iPhone running iOS 15.6 as an external device, the app appear in the Settings list and I can allow it to have access to Photos. When I connect to an iPad running iOS 15.5 as an external device the program runs but fails when trying to access photos using info[UIImagePickerController.InfoKey.phAsset.rawValue]. This is commonly because permission to access photos has not been given to the app. When I tried to set this I found that the app did not appear in the Settings list. The app does appear in the iPhone settings list even though it has never been installed from the App Store.

CodePudding user response：

Okay, so it turns out that you mean you're running from Xcode on the device. Good! But that is irrelevant to the question, as it turns out.

The question is why it is that, on the iPad, there is no entry for your app in the Settings app, is that right? So that would be because on the iPad you've never done anything that causes the app to request permission (such as photos).

The point is, you cannot initiate the granting of permissions from Settings; the app itself must first request permission from the user (using the correct PHPhotoLibrary call). Only after that happens will the app acquire a place in Settings where the user can modify the initial permissions.

CodePudding user response：

Adding a programmatic definition of photo access options as suggested by Matt in main form viewWillAppear solved the problem as per https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/delivering_an_enhanced_privacy_experience_in_your_photos_app. However, iOS 14 or newer is required.