Photo settings on iPhone's Safari stuck on “Private Access” with iOS 17

In Settings>Privacy and Security>Photos, Safari shows Private Access as the only option and states "This app can show your photo library but can only access the items you select." I cannot find anywhere to select/deselect photos. All other apps show None, Limited Access or Full Access. I am missing something.

Can anyone shed some light?



[Re-Titled by Moderator]


iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 17

Posted on Sep 22, 2023 5:04 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 14, 2023 11:02 PM

The setting “Private Access” is perfectly fine. If you have trouble selecting photos from your Photo Library to upload to websites there might be another problem (like e.g. not seeing videos in the selector because the site would only take stills).


As the text for this “unchangeable setting” explains, it means that Safari and therefore websites by default have No Access to your Photo Library, it remains “Private”.


When you want to upload photos to a website from your Photo Library, you get a photo picker like the one for „Limited Access“ to select which photos the upload process will see at all. The only difference to „Limited Access“ is, that it does not remember your last choices but defaults to no photos selected for access every time. Hence the different naming „Private Access“.


This is by the way not new and exactly the way photo selection for certain apps like Browsers worked before (I assume since iOS 14). With iOS 17 only the presentation and wording of this function changed. Up to iOS 16 “Limited Access” showed as “Selected Photos” and Apps like Safari would be listed separately under the heading “Apps with One-Off Photo Selection”, see screenshot.


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108 replies

Apr 9, 2024 12:48 PM in response to Saltie Dawg

just called Apple again, I was told by a supervisor that this isn’t something that can be “fixed”, it would be a “feature request”, even though this is a feature they changed to begin with. So if everyone wants this “feature” to go back to the “feature” it always was, we need to put a request in with Apple. Silly.

Jan 30, 2024 3:06 PM in response to Saltie Dawg

Hey!! I just had this problem and it started yesterday. This morning I contacted apple with this issue they couldn’t do much all they told me to do is going into my settings and do all these things that do NOT! work. They scheduled a phone call from, she told me to just contact the apps and they do not have anything to do with that. Which is all lies. This is how to solve it


Update that phone! Any other things might work but these are for the people that cannot find anything and tried everything. It’s a new update 17.3 if it still doesn’t work wait for another update which shouldn’t take anything but up to 2-3 weeks.


It’s not your storage, you not doing anything wrong and your phone is not broke! This is the solution to the problem :)

Mar 16, 2024 9:36 PM in response to Saltie Dawg

Are you getting this when you are low on storage?


I had under a couple gig left on my iPad when this thing showed up. I cleaned out a ton of junk and everything went back to how it was.


I believe this is a case of Apple trying to protect us from storage issues.? If this is the case a nice notification or explanation would be nice. Actually, it would just be common sense.

Sep 28, 2023 5:47 AM in response to Lissy_12

Hello Lissy_12,

Thank You for your reply but unfortunately the link you provided does not address the question posed as addressed by applepie's response.

I apologize in advance if my second query seems simplistic but I think I might not have posed my question correctly.

I was asking;

  1. All apps except Safari show 3 choices listed in Settings>Privacy & Security>Photos (none, limited access, full access)
  2. Safari only shows private access stating "This app can show your photo library, but can only access the items you select".
  3. I can find nowhere any select/deselect settings or any user settings for that matter for Safari/Photos.
  4. I don't have a privacy concern, just trying to understand the apparently new IOS 17 feature.

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Photo settings on iPhone's Safari stuck on “Private Access” with iOS 17

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