How to Hide Photos on your iPhone without using any Apps

Do you have any photographs on your iPhone (or iPad) that you wish to hide from family members while they are casually flipping through the photo albums on your iOS device?

hide photos Hide the iPhone photos in the photo library itself

How to Hide Photos on your iPhone /iPad

The Apps Store is flooded with apps that can password protect your iOS photos or your even use Dropbox. First transfer the sensitive pictures from the camera roll to your Dropbox folder and then add a 4-digit Passcode to the Dropbox app. Thus, your photos stay on the device but completely hidden.

Here’s another trick (see video demo) that will let you hide photos inside your photo albums but without requiring any apps or passwords.

  1. Open the photo library on your iPhone (or iPad) and tap the photo that you wish to keep a secret.
  2. Tap “Edit” and then tap the “Crop” tool at the bottom.
  3. Drag the corners of the cropping box inside such that a very small portion of the image is visible inside that box.
  4. Save the cropped version and it will replace the original image in your camera roll.

When you edit a photo inside iOS, the original copy gets saved along with the edited version and hence we can easily get back to the original unedited version. [via]

Also see: How to Hide Files on your Computer

Video Demo - Hiding Photos in Plain Sight

To see the original image, just open the edited image inside the photo album, choose “Edit” and then tap “Revert to Original.” In the case of iPhone, the “Revert to Original” option is missing but you can manually drag the cropping handles outside to see the original version.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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