How To Really Hide Photos On iPhone In iOS 14

iOS 14 enhances the photo hiding feature introduced in previous versions. Until now, to conceal an image from the Photos app you had to select it and use the ‘Hide’ option. This would secrete the image from the CameraRoll and the For You section, but still display it in the Albums section, in the ‘Hidden’ (Sick!) folder.

In iOS 14 you can also hide the ‘Hidden Album’, thus obtain almost total privacy for those photos that you don’t want to expose, but neither delete. I used the term ‘almost’ because even with the Hidden album put out of sight, hidden photos will continue to appear in the photo picker area of third-party apps.

A good example is when you want to add a photo on social media, or edit it with an editing app. The ‘Hidden’ album will show up when browsing through your pictures to pull your image out from the Photos app.

9 Steps To Really Hide Photos On iPhone

How To Hide Photos

1. Open the ‌Photos‌ app on your iOS 14 / iPadOS 14 device.
2. Tap ‘Select’, available in the top-right corner of the screen.
3. Pick one ore more photos.
4. Use the Share button, available in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
5. Tap on ‘Hide’, available in the second section of the Share Sheet’s menu.
6. Tap ‘Hide Photo’ in the the prompt that slides up from the bottom of the screen to confirm.

How To Hide The Hidden Album

7. Open the Settings app.
8. Scroll for Photos.
9. Scroll until you reach the ‘Hidden Album’ label. The switch has to be turned OFF (grey position) for the folder to be hidden!
Fact: The default iOS 14 setting has the Hidden Album enabled, which means that the folder will display in Albums, under Utilities.

How To Hide Videos On iPhone

Can you also hide videos? Yes, all media files that are displayed in Photos can be concealed. The procedure is identical with the one described above.

How To Unhide A Photo On iPhone

If you reconsider and want to have one or more images displayed normally in the CameraRoll you have to proceed as follows:

1. Display the Hidden Album by following the steps 7 -> 9 from above.
2. Open the Hidden Album by browsing for Photos -> Albums -> Utilities (Hidden Album).
3. Tap on the hidden photo that you want to make public.
4. Use the Share icon, bottom-left corner of the screen.
5. Scroll for ‘Unhide’ in the Share Sheet’s menu options.

Hide Photos on iPhone Video Tutorial

We’ve also recorded a video to make it as easy as possible for you to apply this new iOS 14 feature on your own iOS device:

Locking iPhone photos with a Passcode or Face ID is still not available, but perhaps it might come in future iterations of iOS 14, or why not alongside iOS 15 in 2021.

Do you hide photos on your iPhone? Let us know if you prefer this stock feature or you use another third-party solution.

Related: Do you know that you can caption photos and videos in iOS 14? What about the trick that allows you to hide Home Screen pages?