How to hide and password protect photos on iOS

Apple consistently makes improvements to its camera app every year. New features are added and the Photos app gets a boost to incorporate them. The improvements never go beyond what’s needed to view photos and perform basic edits. Your camera roll isn’t really sophisticated even though iOS itself is. If you want to hide photos on iOS, you can but anyone who has access to your phone can unhide and view them. Real security would be to password protect photos instead of just putting them in an album literally named ‘Hidden’.

The Photos app doesn’t let you add a password to photos but the Notes app allows you to create password protected notes, and a note can include an image. You can use a password locked note in the Notes app to hide sensitive photos.

Password protect photos

The Notes app saves a decent quality photo but you should use this trick only for important images that you need to keep on your phone but also need to keep hidden. For photos that you need to preserve the quality of, we do not recommend using this method.

Open the Photos app and find the photo you want to hide behind a password. Open it, and tap the share button at the bottom left. From the action sheet, tap Copy.

Next, open the Notes app and tap the new note button. Give the note a title. This is optional of course but in the long run, it will help you identify the contents of the note. After you give the note a title, tap and hold on the note’s body until you see the paste option. Tap the Paste option and the image you copied from the Photos app will be pasted in the note.

Return to the main Notes app interface and swipe left on the note you just created. Tap the padlock button to lock it. You will have to verify the lock with either your passcode, Touch ID, or Face ID. Once you’ve done that, the note will be locked.

If someone has access to your unlocked phone, they will still need to unlock the note with one of the three security options. An unlocked iPhone doesn’t mean all the locked notes in the Notes app are also unlocked.

You should of course back up and delete the original photo from your phone. Encrypt the back-up you take of the photo so that it isn’t easy to access on whichever storage media you save it to.