I've never tried to do this or similar in Windows (obviously easy in unix-like environments) but I'm going to bet it's far more trouble than it's worth for 99% of users

On macOS at least those 99% of users are probably installing from the App Store, where apps are sandboxed by default and need to explicitly ask for access to paths outside that sandbox. Even when not installed from the App Store a permission dialogue is popped if an application tries to read from sensitive paths like your photo library.