iPhone Lock Photos

Touch ID is a very useful feature that is included in iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in iPhone series. By using Touch ID, you can generally protect your device. In simple words, you can lock down your entire iPhone using Touch ID. It works as same as PIN lock or Passcode. Even Touch ID locking system is much more secure than any other locking system for your iPhone.

But if someone gets into your phone, they’ll be able to look through all your text messages without a problem on iOS 8. If you’re trying to hide something, the best thing to do is delete those text messages, photos, emails, or whatever else you don’t want others to see.

Restrict Your Apps with Guided Access

There is one built-in feature that you can use to stop others from snooping around, but it isn’t the greatest thing in the world. In the Accessibility settings, you’ll find Guided Access, which will allow you to keep your iPhone in a single app and control which features are available to it.

Once Guided Access is enabled, use the triple-click home button feature to bring it up. Draw across the screen to block certain areas from being accessed, then tap Start. Once Guided Access is up and running, no one will be able to touch the parts of the screen you disabled unless they know your passcode.

This nifty trick could prove useful to stop others from reading all of your text messages — as you can see in the picture above, I blocked all text messages (in the grey) but the one i wanted to show. When you want Guided Access gone, just triple click the home button and enter your passcode to get rid of it.

Folder Lock Is Your Digital Locker

Folder Lock, from NewSoftwares, is a relatively simple and password-protected app for your photos, music, documents, voice memos, notes, contacts, and more. Every time you leave the Folder Lock app, you’ll have to re-enter the password in order to access your files, thus protecting you from would-be snoops. Just make sure that you delete the pictures or files you save in Folder Lock from their album on your phone, because Folder Lock is just a storage utility—it doesn’t have the necessary access to get rid of copies stored outside its secured folders.

Other apps like Secret Folder Icon FREE and .folder do pretty much the same thing as Folder Lock, so there are plenty of options for you in the App Store.

Hide photos in iOS

Everyone likely has a few photos sitting on their iPhone they’d rather nobody else see, whether it’s embarrassing selfies, poorly filtered or edited pics, a picture of a receipt or personal paperwork, or anything else in the realm of private photos. Those pictures can make showing someone another picture on your iPhone (or iPad) an awkward experience, as you’re hoping they don’t start flipping through your Camera Roll to discover that terrible photo of you after winning the pie eating contest. Fortunately the newest versions of iOS include a new way to mitigate that potential awkwardness by hiding select photos.

The photo hiding feature must be enabled individually for each picture, as it’s set on a per-image basis. At the moment there is no bulk hide function like there is with the ability to bulk remove a bunch of photos all at once, so you may want to get in the habit of regularly hiding the pictures you don’t want to show up in your general photos app views.

Note this feature is available only to iOS 8 and newer, and though we’re going to focus on the iPhone here, it works the same on the iPad and iPod touch too.

Hiding a Photo in iOS:

  1. Open Photos and go to Camera Roll or Albums as usual.
  2. Tap on the picture you wish to hide, this will open it as usual.
  3. Tap and hold on the photo itself to bring up an action menu, choose “Hide”.
  4. Confirm that you want to hide the picture by tapping “Hide Photo”.

Now that a picture or many are hidden, they’ll become invisible to the Collections, Years views, and instead are placed in a separate “Hidden” album.

Accessing Your Hidden Photos in iOS:

  1. Open the Photos app and tap on “Albums” view.
  2. Locate in the list of Albums the folder called “Hidden”.
  3. Find your hidden photos in the Hidden Album.

This is where all of your hidden photos will be stored.

Note that while a picture is hidden, it can still be shared or sent through messages as usual, as long as you access it from this hidden album.

Unhiding a Picture in iOS:

  1. From the Hidden photo album, tap on the picture you want to unhide.
  2. Tap and hold on the picture and choose “Unhide” from the submenu that pops up.

This sends the picture back to the general Camera Roll and it becomes accessible to all albums and collections views again.

Is the Photo Really Hidden on the iPhone?

It’s important to understand how the hide photo function works: the photo(s) are hidden from the camera roll, Moments, Collections, and Year view, but are still visible in a photo album not-so-discretely called “Hidden”. In other words, while this is very effective at hiding photos from casual iPhone use and from flipping through your pictures in iOS, anyone who knows to look for the ‘Hidden’ album can still view the hidden images.