Hi Greg,
I’m the primary developer on iNat iOS. I’m the one who chose to pull the multi-photo selection. I’m also the one who initially implemented it a few years ago.
I agree that it’s a bummer when features are pulled, but please understand that I did this for a very good reason. iOS 13 deprecated a number of older developer libraries, and the third-party library we were using to do multi-photo selection was hit hard. It was causing significant amounts of instability, crashes in the app in unpredictable ways, etc. In order to bring multi-photo selection back, I’m either going to have to re-implement that whole library, or find a new third-party library. Both will take time, and are further complicated by the fact that we can’t use Swift libraries in the iOS app right now, since one of the other third-party libraries we’re using (RestKit) won’t compile with Swift. I’ve been working on removing this problematic library for a while now, but it’s slow going because we use it a ton.
So my plan is to keep working to remove Restkit, the third-party library that won’t compile with Swift, so that in the future I’ll be able to choose from the vast menu of Swift libraries that do camera/photo library picker stuff, with lots of support for multi-photo selection.
In the meantime, I can’t do anything other than ask you to be patient.
Thanks,
alex