In your time using iOS 16, you must have been generally delighted with the new features and improvements. The customizable lock screen is amusing.
Removing the background of images just by keeping down on a picture’s subject still hasn’t gotten old. But only a few days after the new software cruised out, you’ve already found your biggest frustration: iOS now requests if it’s okay to paste an item from one app to another.
Constantly. Over and over and over again. There must be a more plausible explanation than this.
You may understand the why after the new prompt. Your iPhone’s clipboard often contains sensitive data — passwords, personal photos, two-factor passcodes, etc.
Apps likely skim this information more often than any of us realize. And this is another example of Apple abiding by its mantra on privacy: ask people in plain English if they want to allow apps to access their information. Ask them repeatedly.
But the new prompt is adding friction where it never existed before. It’s making a copy and pastes inherently less seamless. For example, if you cut out the subject of an image in Photos, copy it, and go to paste it into a text in Messages, you get hit with the permission dialog—every time. The same goes for pasting something into Notes.
In iOS 16, Apple has made some notable improvements to the Photos app, one of which is the ability to copy and edit your drive to an image and then paste them to other pictures. Please keep reading to learn how it’s done.
iOS 16 Photos and Camera Guide Feature
If you have multiple photos, you like to edit the same way, or if you’ve made changes to one image that you want to replicate in another, you can utilize the new copy and paste edits tools in ??iOS 16??.
To employ the new option in the Photos app, open a picture, tap Edit, and make the adjustments you want. When you’re finished, tap Done on the ellipsis (three dots) icon in the upper right intersection of the interface.
From there, tap Copy Edits in the dropdown menu to copy everything that you did to the image to the clipboard. Then open up another photo, tap on the ellipsis (three-dot) icon again, and tap Paste Edits to get the same adjustments.
These are core iPhone applications, and while it’s appropriate that Apple applies its rules universally, you may also find yourself thinking in frustration, It’s okay to paste this picture into a message. But, again, we’re talking about a fundamental, standard action flow. Now there’s a hurdle in the middle.
Apple double checking such direct user intent.
The objective of preventing apps from snooping on your clipboard is reasonable. But indeed, Apple can include “always allow” among the choices so that people won’t have to see this screen constantly. Or the company could add a “pasteboard” toggle to the privacy settings for each app in the way it does for location, notifications, background data, etc. Just give us some form of permanence for our copy-and-paste preferences.
The pop-up happens so frequently that I’m almost wondering if it’s a bug and not the intended behavior. And sometimes, when pasting into Slack, it doesn’t come up at all. Nothing has changed so far in the first betas of iOS 16.1, but I’m hoping Apple will refine this interaction sooner.