Selecting Hundreds of Photos & Videos
If you've been on a multi-hour shoot, you probably have a lot of media to sift. Here's how POV Syncer's picker handles big selections cleanly.
The numbers
- Up to 2,000 videos per session
- Up to 2,000 photos per session
- Both are far more than any real shoot needs — the cap exists so we can reason about memory safely
On the rendering side, POV Syncer caps overlay rendering at 100 photos per video. If a single clip matches more than that, the renderer picks 100 evenly across the timeline and tells you in the log. That keeps memory bounded on long sessions where one video might match hundreds of photos.
The three ways to multi-select
Tap each thumbnail (basic)
Open either picker, tap each thumbnail in turn — each shows a blue checkmark with a number indicating the selection order. Tap again to deselect; numbers renumber automatically.
Best for: small selections (under 20 items) where you want precise control over which ones go in.
Tap-and-drag-left (range select)
Tap one thumbnail, then without lifting, drag your finger left across the row to extend the selection. Apple's picker supports drag-range selection in any direction, but on iOS 26 right/down drags can trigger a drag-to-export gesture instead — left drags are the most reliable.
Best for: grabbing whole batches that are visually together — a single shoot's worth of photos in one row of the grid.
Use the Photos app's albums first
POV Syncer's picker respects whatever album you're in. If your Ray-Ban Meta shoot is already in a dedicated album, switch to that album in the picker first (tap the album name at the top of the picker). Now every thumbnail in the grid is a candidate — selection is much faster.
What about Select All?
iOS's system picker deliberately doesn't have a Select All button — Apple's privacy model is "the user grants exactly what they tapped." A custom Select All would require us to replace the system picker entirely with our own PhotoKit-backed grid, which we haven't built (yet).
Until then, the album trick above is the closest substitute.
Will the app slow down with hundreds of items?
No — and this is worth understanding. When you select 500 photos, POV Syncer doesn't load them into memory. It just remembers the PHAsset references and reads each photo's EXIF timestamp (a few KB per photo). The actual photo bytes stay in the Photos library until rendering needs them.
The same goes for videos — the deferred file resolver means the video bytes get copied into the app sandbox only at the moment they're about to be processed, one clip at a time.