White Balance, manual and auto#5

Use a color picker to pick what area in your photo is white, such that the black/white point, temperature, and tint are corrected.

That’ is very important and a must-use tool for every photographer 👍🏻

Definitely the ONE feature that would make Darkroom perfect for me.

Do those apps perform non-destructive editing in iOS/iPadOS on photos stored in iCloud Photo Library? Or must they import the photo into the app first?

No idea, I don’t use iCloud Photo Library. Affinity Photo 2 does have non-destructive editing though. Unsure if it’s for iCloud Photo Library, and I personally don’t care about destructive photo editing. I edit a RAW and export a JPEG. I always keep the RAW and if I want to make a new edit, I can.

There are countless photo editors on the market. But Darkroom’s full compatibility with iCloud is a huge selling point for many including myself. Otherwise I’d be using Lightroom.

It’s a huge convenience to have all your photos accessible from any device without using up local storage and to be able to edit from any device and have that automatically reflected everywhere else.

Your theory isn’t bad, but I do believe it to be incorrect. If you were right, I think instead of the developers adding the “Planned” tag, they would have simply said “Sorry, doing this just isn’t possible with the iCloud Photos API.”

That’s possible. Or it’s also possible they don’t want to alienate potential customers by admitting a key feature is impossible until and unless Apple changes their API. Notice how there are no other iOS photo editing apps that do this while working within iCloud Photo Library. That ones that do, like Lightroom, require exporting the image first.

Also, this feature request is now 3 years old.

Maybe a start here ?
“iOS 18.1 beta 3 adds new ‘Clean Up’ feature to the Photos app” :
https://9to5mac.com/2024/08/28/ios-18-1-beta-3-clean-up-feature/

That has been offered hi other products for many years. The fact that Apple is way behind isn’t my idea of a flex.

I just checked Photomator, which is another iOS native photo editor using iPhotos and they don’t have traditional WB but they have an AI white balance (AI changes are destructive I believe but I hope not to the RAW file)