Accessing iCloud photos uniquely on multiple devices using PHAsset

Question

Is there a way of accessing a specific PHAsset in an iCloud album uniquely on multiple devices?

I have written a simple app that lists thumbnails and .localIdentifiers from an iCloud shared album, and (naturally) it shows the same images on different devices, however, the localIdentifiers are different for the same images on different devices (not so unexpected as it is a "local" identifier).

However, what I actually want to do is associate a record in a cloud-shared CoreData database with an image in the cloud, rather than embed the image in the CoreData (it's a genealogy app, with potentially thousands of images) - for this I would need an identifier that is unique regardless of the device. Is there anyway to do this?

Answer 1

PHAsset.cloudIdentifier is available as private API.

let identifier = phAsset.value(forKey: "cloudIdentifier") as? String

Refer to iOS runtime header: https://github.com/JaviSoto/iOS10-Runtime-Headers/blob/master/Frameworks/Photos.framework/PHAsset.h

Answer 2

Unfortunately not. In the early iOS 8 betas there was a cloud-identifier (which is exactly what you look for), but it was removed later on from the Photos API.