How to hide photos on iPhone

Most people want the same thing when they search for this: a photo that stays out of the camera roll when someone scrolls through it. iOS has a built-in way to do exactly that, and it takes a few seconds. What it does not do is turn your photos into something only you can open, so it helps to know where the line is.

Hide a photo with the Photos app

The Hidden album is a special album in the Photos app that holds items you have chosen to remove from your main library view. Photos you hide disappear from the Library grid, from your regular albums and from most suggestions, but they are not deleted.

1. Open Photos and tap the photo or video.
2. Tap the More (•••) button.
3. Choose Hide and confirm.

To hide many items at once, tap Select in the library, tap each thumbnail, then use the More button at the bottom of the screen and choose Hide. You can also touch and hold a single thumbnail and pick Hide from the menu without opening it.

Hiding works for photos, videos, Live Photos and screenshots alike. If you hide one shot from a burst or one item from a set of duplicates, only that item is hidden, so it is worth checking for near-identical copies.

Find the Hidden album

Where the album lives depends on your iOS version:

• iOS 18: open Photos and scroll down to Utilities. Hidden sits there with Recently Deleted and other system collections.
• iOS 26: the Photos app is organized into separate library and collections views. Look for the Utilities section in the collections view.
• iOS 16 and 17: open the Albums tab and scroll to the bottom, under Utilities.

If you do not see Hidden at all, the album has probably been switched off from view. The next section covers that setting.

Lock and conceal the Hidden album

Two settings control how visible the album is. In iOS 18 and later both are in Settings › Apps › Photos; on earlier versions they are in Settings › Photos.

Use Face ID (or Use Touch ID / Use Passcode on devices without Face ID). Since iOS 16 this is on by default. It requires authentication before the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums open. Leave it on; there is little reason to turn it off.

Show Hidden Album. When this is off, the Hidden album is removed from the Photos app entirely. Someone browsing your phone sees no Hidden entry to tap. To get back to your hidden photos, you turn the setting on again.

Used together, these two settings mean a casual viewer neither sees the photos nor sees an obvious album that invites curiosity. For a lot of everyday situations, such as handing your phone to a friend to look at holiday pictures, that is enough.

For a version that compares this with locking the whole Photos app, see how to lock photos on iPhone.

What hiding does not protect

Hiding is a visibility feature. It is useful, but it is worth being precise about its limits before you rely on it for anything sensitive.

Situation	Does the Hidden album help?
Someone scrolls your camera roll	Yes, hidden items are not in the grid
Someone knows your device passcode	No, the passcode opens the album
Your phone is unlocked and handed over	Partly; Face ID still guards the album, but the passcode fallback works for anyone who knows it
iCloud Photos is on	Hidden items sync to your other devices and to iCloud
A family member uses your Mac or iPad	They may find the same Hidden album there
The photo was also sent in a chat	The chat copy is unaffected

The passcode point matters most. Face ID is the first prompt, but iOS always offers your device passcode as a fallback. A partner, family member or anyone who has watched you unlock your phone can usually open the Hidden album.

iCloud is the second point. With iCloud Photos enabled, hidden photos are stored in iCloud like the rest of your library. They are end-to-end encrypted only if you have turned on Advanced Data Protection; otherwise Apple holds the keys for your Photos data. The guides on whether hidden photos are saved to iCloud and iCloud Advanced Data Protection go into detail, and is the iPhone Hidden album private? looks at the album’s privacy more broadly.

Finally, apps you have given full photo library access to can, in principle, request hidden items through Apple’s photo framework. Reviewing that list is a good habit: see which apps can see your photos.

When an encrypted vault makes more sense

An encrypted vault is an app that stores copies of your photos in its own storage, encrypted with a key that only your secret unlocks. It is a different tool from the Hidden album: instead of hiding items inside the Photos library, it takes them out of it.

That is worth the extra step when:

• other people know your iPhone passcode, or might be able to make you unlock it;
• you use iCloud Photos and don’t want certain images in your cloud library;
• you share devices or an Apple Account with family;
• the content would cause real harm if seen (ID scans, medical photos, intimate images).

The trade-off is responsibility. A vault that keeps data only on your device cannot restore it for you if you lose the phone or forget how to unlock it.

Where Velcrypt fits

Velcrypt is one example of that second approach. You unlock it by drawing a pattern on a 5×5 grid of dots instead of using Face ID or your device passcode, so knowing your iPhone passcode does not open it. Files are encrypted with AES-256-GCM on the device, there is no account, and vault data is not included in iCloud backups. Each pattern opens its own separate vault, and an unknown pattern simply opens an empty one; the page on hidden vaults explains why that matters.

Importing to Velcrypt copies a photo rather than moving it, so the original stays in Photos until you delete it yourself, including from Recently Deleted. The guide to deleting originals after import walks through that. For an overview of the photo side of the app, see hide photos with Velcrypt, and for a side-by-side view, Velcrypt vs the iPhone Hidden album.