I’m trying to find a way to reference photos in the User Photos Library and add those references in a SwiftData record. I can, of course, get the photos from the library, convert to Data type and store that in SwiftData, but I’m trying to avoid duplicating all that data (there will be a lot of photos). I thought I should be able to get a URL for a Photos item, but have not found any way to do that. I tried making a property in the SwiftData model for [PhotosPickerItem] but that fails with the error: “Referencing instance method ‘setValue(forKey:to:)’ on ‘Array’ requires that ‘PhotosPickerItem’ conform to ‘PersistentModel'” in the model initializer.

The idea of the model:

@Model
final public class Thing {
    
    var name: String = ""
    var comment: String = ""
    var photoPickerItems: [PhotosPickerItem] = []

    init(name: String, comment: String) {
        self.name = name
        self.comment = comment
    }
}//class

And then in the picker view:

struct ImagePickerView: View {
    @Binding var selectedImageURLs: [URL]
    @State private var selectedItems: [PhotosPickerItem] = []
    
    var thing: Thing
    
    var body: some View {
        PhotosPicker(selection: $selectedItems, maxSelectionCount: 5,           matching: .images, photoLibrary: .shared()) {
            Text("Select Images")
                .font(.headline)
                .padding()
                .background(Color.blue)
                .foregroundColor(.white)
                .cornerRadius(8)
        }
        .onChange(of: selectedItems) { oldItems, newItems in
            Task {
                thing.photoPickerItems = []
                for item in newItems {
                    thing.photoPickerItems.append(item)
                }
            }
        }
    }
}   

I would appreciate any guidance on a way to accomplish the idea. Xcode 15.4, iOS 17.5