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Availability of photo gallery app code kit

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#1

Hi Chris or other members of CWC,

Arthur asked me to post the following question on the forum instead of using the CWC chat. My mother has had a cerebral infarction. Since that moment the Apple Photos app is to difficult to use for her. But she wants to see her photo’s on her iPad. Therefore I am searching for a super simple photo app. I couldn’t find any in the app store, so I am trying to find source code that I can compile myself (and fine tune if necessary for her). I found the great series of CWC articles “Building a Photo Gallery app in SwiftUI” by Iñaki Narciso. I don’t have much time and I have very limited experience with Xcode and Swift so I ran into issues that I can’t solve while trying to build the app using the info in the articles. Do I understand correctly from Building a Photo Gallery app in SwiftUI Part 4: Adding Multiple Gestures that you can make the source code available as a complete kit in such a way that I can simply compile and run it? If so, how can you make that available? Alternative suggestions are welcome too, obviously. I just want to make her happy with her photos in the albums in the Photos app again with a user interface that is as simple as possible.

Thanks,
Peter Dubbelman

#2

@PeterDubbelman

Hi Peter,

Welcome to the community.

It’s great that you are trying to help your Mum out in this way.

There are a couple of impediments to compiling your own (or someone else’s) code and loading it on a device outside of using the App Store.

  • If you do not have a Paid Developer account the App will only work for a short period of time and have to be re-installed and you are limited to the number of Apps you can create in a 10 day window. Yeah, it’s fairly restrictive.
  • If you have a Paid Developer account you can create as many App’s as you like and load them on your device but after 12 months they stop working and you will have to re-install them. You can load App’s on other peoples devices but there is a limit to the number of registered devices that you can attach to your Mac.
  • If you go down the path of publishing an App to the App Store then that assumes that you have a Paid up Developer account and you also must use the latest version of Xcode which in turn requires macOS to be kept up to date in order to run the latest version of Xcode.

So overall it is better to have an App available on the App Store. Alternatively, just reload it after it expires, which assumes that you have a Paid Developer account.

What exactly do you want in an App for your Mum?

Do you want all the photographs to be listed in a collection much like the way they are in the Photos App that comes with an iPhone or an iPad?

Do you want the App to automatically run a slide show of all the images on start up and show them in random order or sequentially?

Do you want to be able to scroll through the images and select an image to view?

Just something to think about.

#3

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot for informing me so well about what I need to know at this moment! Greatly appreciated!

My mother just wants a highly simplified version of the Photos app to select one of approximately 30 albums that I set up for her containing her photos and videos of an event. Then she would love to be able to browse through the thumbnails looking for a specific photo that she wants to see. She wants to be able to see that photo enlarged, preferably even being able to zoom in on details. Finally she would like to scroll through the enlarged photos. She doesn’t need a slide show and I am afraid any functionality more than I just described would make it much more difficult for her to use. Since the infarction reading is very difficult for my mother, so her primary means of searching photos is by looking at thumbnails of photos. Unfortunately I didn’t find such a basic and simple app in App Store; apps are just getting more advanced and complicated. I guess there must be quite a few people that would love to have simple apps for any reason, so there probably should be a market for that. If you know a developer who would create an application like the one I just described where privacy would be high (no information gathered) for a small amount of money, I think I wouldn’t be the only one buying it immediately for a relative! I’m afraid I won’t have time to do it myself within a year or so (which is too late for my mother), but when I get more time I will undoubtedly have a look at what you are offering to teach me on how to build apps!

Any suggestions are welcome!

Thanks a lot again,
Peter Dubbelman