Bug Report - Slow image pasting from Photos

AnkiMobile (iPhone/iPad) Help
1

Hi,

Anki: 25.09
iOS: 26.6

in AnkiMobile on iOS, inserting images from the Photos app has become very slow. After selecting an image, it takes around 5–6 seconds before the image appears in the note editor.

The issue is reproducible and occurs consistently.

Could you please have a look at this issue?

Thanks!

2

I was not able to reproduce the reported behavior. AnkiMobile 25.09, iOS 26.6.1, iPhone 13.

This is what I see:

  1. In the note Add or Edit screen, select a field.
  2. Press the paperclip icon to get the “Add Media” overlay menu.
  3. Select “From Photos”. (The photo picker appears.)
  4. Select a photo. (If needed, “Downloading from iCloud…” is seen while the photo downloads.)
  5. Back in AnkiMobile, the image appears in the field almost instantly.

You might want to try powering off your phone completely, powering it back on, and then trying again to see if there is any change in behavior.

3

Thanks for your response.

Yes, when I first open the photo picker, the gallery usually appears almost instantly. However, after adding around 3–5 photos, opening the gallery starts to become noticeably slower.

After that, the issue occurs roughly every second or third time I try to add another image from the photo gallery. So the slowdown seems to develop after using the photo picker several times within AnkiMobile rather than happening immediately after launching the app.

Restarting the iPhone temporarily resets the behavior, but after adding several images, the slowdown starts happening again.

Here is a Screen Capture

4

I am confused about what problem behavior you are seeing?

In your original post, you said that the problem behavior was that after selecting a photo, it took 5-6 seconds before the image appeared in the Anki note editor. However, in your second post, you mentioned an entirely different behavior where opening the photo picker/gallery is slow. (In your video, it took about 4 seconds for the photo picker/gallery to appear.)

In any case, on my iPhone I do see that sometimes opening the photo picker/gallery takes longer to open, but at other times it seems to open immediately. The longest delay that I saw was about 4-5 seconds. I was not able to see any pattern to the opening delay times. They seemed to be random. For example, one time opening the photo picker/gallery would take perhaps 5 seconds, but the next time it would open immediately.

I’m not sure whether the delays are something that is happening in Anki or whether they are happening at the iOS level. However, my perception is that the delays seemed to be normal behavior and not a bug.

5

In my original post, I meant that the whole process takes about 5–6 seconds. Sorry, I had it in mind that the delay happened while inserting the photo.

I’m not sure whether the delays are something that is happening in Anki or whether they are happening at the iOS level.

I was able to reproduce the same behavior in Google Keep, so this seems to be an iOS-level issue. Sorry for the confusion!

The Windows version of Anki has also been starting very slowly recently, so I initially thought there might be a general issue with Anki.