Open Radar

 
Summary:
Starting in the iOS 8 GM seed, the ALAssetsGroupSavedPhotos group no longer returns all photos in the camera roll. Rather, this call only returns photos that are in the "Recently Added" group.

For instance, on a device with 7,000 photos in the camera roll, a call to -[ALAssetsLibrary enumerateGroupsWithTypes:usingBlock:failureBlock:] to identify the ALAssetGroup with type == ALAssetsGroupSavedPhotos will return: "ALAssetsGroup - Name:Recently Added, Type:Saved Photos, Assets count:155"

This violates the documentation provided in the ALAssetsLibrary Class Reference: "ALAssetsGroupSavedPhotos: All the photos in the Camera Roll."

Note that because of this regression, applications do not have a forward-compatible API (i.e. an API that can be utilized when applications are compiled against the iOS 7 SDK) that can be used to access all photos in the camera roll. This will break functionality of existing apps on launch day of iOS 8. For example, Instagram's photo chooser will only show "Recently Added" photos, photo backup solutions such as Google+, Facebook, Flickr and Dropbox will only back up recent photos, etc.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Upgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 8 GM seed on a device that has a large library of photos, with photos older than 30 days.
2. Identify the ALAssetsGroupSavedPhotos group.

Expected Results:
The ALAssetsGroup returned should contain an asset count matching the total number of photos in the camera roll (i.e. it should match the total photo/video count provided at the bottom of Photos.app's "Photos" tab).

Actual Results:
The ALAssetsGroup returned contains only the photos that are within the "Recently Added" album of Photos.app. Further, there is no way for apps compiled against the iOS 7 SDK to access the full history of photos.

Version:
8.0 (12A365)

Notes:


Configuration:
iPhone 5 64 GB, AT&T

Attachments: