How can I load images from a user's photo album on the iPhone?

Question

I\'d like to randomly load images from the user\'s photo album, but I\'d prefer not to have to access an image picker (i.e. I\'d like to have the images be random background

Answer 1

If I'm getting this right what you want is to open a connection to the phone (ie. ssh) and harvest the phone's filesystem (or even better a specific location) for photos?

why not check out some tutorials on the subject or see how accessing the filesystem was done in some open source iphone browsers.

Answer 2

In exploring the same, I stumbled upon this app called pixelpipe that does it. They do a nice job of showing all images in the iphone library. I am not sure how they do it, and how they got approval from apple.

Answer 3

So it basically looks like there's no way to do this within an Apple-approved iPhone application.

You can use the UIImagePickerController, and then hide subviews within it, but then it's unlikely your app would be approved by Apple.

So, looks like we'll have to wait until functionality like this can be added...

Answer 4

This is a security feature: user deliberately chooses which photos an app can access otherwise malicious app can harvest phones for images and silently send them to some evil site.