A free way to Hide & Locks photos on iPhone

Want to hide photos on your iPhone? When you give someone access to your phone, you may want to hide private pictures and videos. The Photos app can help you hide photos. But it simply puts photos in the Hidden photo album without password protection. To hide photos on iPhone and keep them from prying eyes, you need a file security app. Now we have the Files app, the official file manager from Apple. Unfortunately, the Files app doesn’t provide us such file protection functionality at this moment. Do I have to use a third-party security app to lock private photos and videos on iPhone? No, you don’t have to. There is another app which is bundled with the iOS that can help, the Notes app. It provides us a handy way to hide photos and lock secret pictures with passcode or fingerprint on iPhone.

Hide photos on iPhone using Notes app

Firstly you need to create a password for notes or use your Touch ID to lock notes. Follow this tutorial to lock notes on iPhone iPad.

Secondly if you want to keep your private photos on iPhone other than iCloud, you can go to enable the local notes account from Settings >> Notes >> “On My iPhone” Account.

Now you can proceed to hide secret pictures in locked notes on iPhone. Open the Photos app, find and select the photos you want to protect. Tap Share > Add to Notes. Create a new note with the selected photos.

Launch the Notes app on iPhone. You’ll find the new note saved to the iCloud account, the default notes account on iPhone. Swipe left on the new note, choose “Move to” icon, select “On My iPhone” to move the note from iCloud account to local storage and keep your private pictures out of iCloud.

Now the pictures were added to a note and saved in the On My iPhone account locally. We need to enable password protection to lock the note and pictures. To lock the note, swipe left on it, tap Lock icon, then use your fingerprint or enter your password to lock. Notes can’t be locked on iPhone iPad? Simply tap Lock Now at the bottom of the Notes app or restart the Notes app on iPhone.

lock private photos in notes on iphone

Last but not least, you need to delete the original copy of the images and pictures from Photos app. Also delete them from the Recently Deleted folder within the Photos app, otherwise they will stay there for 30 days after deletion.