Photos — Foundations Skill

Purpose

Route Photos and PhotoKit implementation tasks to the minimum required Photos Knowledge Contracts. v1 scope is reaching the user's photo library: selecting assets with no permission at all, requesting access when selection is not enough, behaving correctly under limited access, reading assets and their images, and writing new ones — not editing photos, not playing Live Photos or video, and not capturing from the camera.

Routing

Load only the contracts relevant to the task. All paths relative to knowledge/photos/.

• Presenting PhotosPicker or PHPickerViewController; setting selectionLimit/maxSelectionCount or a PHPickerFilter; reading PHPickerResult.itemProvider/assetIdentifier or a PhotosPickerItem -> picker-and-selection-results.md
• Calling PHPhotoLibrary.requestAuthorization(for:handler:)/authorizationStatus(for:); choosing PHAccessLevel.addOnly vs .readWrite; declaring NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription/NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription; branching on PHAuthorizationStatus -> authorization-and-access-levels.md
• Handling PHAuthorizationStatus.limited; calling presentLimitedLibraryPicker(from:); setting PHPhotoLibraryPreventAutomaticLimitedAccessAlert -> limited-library.md
• Building a PHFetchOptions query; holding or refreshing a PHFetchResult; fetching a PHAssetCollection's members; reading where a photo was taken from PHAsset.location -> asset-fetching.md
• Calling PHImageManager.requestImage(...); setting PHImageRequestOptions' isSynchronous/deliveryMode/isNetworkAccessAllowed; priming a PHCachingImageManager -> image-requests.md
• Running performChanges(_:completionHandler:); creating with PHAssetChangeRequest/PHAssetCreationRequest; capturing placeholderForCreatedAsset -> saving-to-the-library.md

Never load more than the contracts relevant to the specific question. For how a usage-description string should be worded, route to skill.app-store-review-guidelines.submission. For whether to show a pre-permission screen and what it says, route to skill.human-interface-guidelines.foundations. For declaring photo data in PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy, route to skill.privacy.foundations.

Stop Conditions

Stop and report if the requested topic has no matching Knowledge Contract in knowledge/photos/ — do not guess or fall back to general knowledge. Photo and video editing (PHContentEditingInput, PHContentEditingOutput, adjustment data, Photo Editing extensions), PHLivePhotoView, AVAsset export from a PHAsset, and PHAssetResource-level resource copying are out of scope entirely (see docs/architecture/domain-map.md). Capturing a new photo from the camera is AVFoundation's and has no Skill yet — report that rather than answering.

A photo's recorded capture place is this domain's, not core-location's, even though PHAsset.location is typed as a CLLocation: asset-fetching.md Rule 5 owns it, including the authorization question. Route to core-location only when the task needs the device's current or ongoing location, which is a different subject.

SwiftUI interop with this domain is split deliberately, and the split is this Skill's: PhotosPicker is SwiftUI-native, so picker-and-selection-results.md Rule 2 forbids wrapping the picker, while presentLimitedLibraryPicker(from:) takes a UIViewController and has no SwiftUI counterpart, so limited-library.md Rule 5 requires a bridge. How any such wrapper is written belongs to uikit-interaction and is not restated here.