everyday mac tools

Hide and lock private photos on a Mac

· 7 min read

To hide photos on a Mac, select them in Photos, choose Image, Hide (or press Cmd-L) and confirm. They disappear from your library, albums and Memories and move to the Hidden album. To lock that album, choose Photos, Settings, General and tick Use Touch ID or password; from then on Photos asks for your fingerprint or login password before it shows Hidden or Recently Deleted.

That stops someone scrolling through Photos on your Mac. It does not protect the files themselves, the other copies, or the private images that never went into Photos at all, and those are where most leaks happen.

How to hide photos on a Mac in Photos

  1. Open Photos and select the photos or videos. Cmd-click to pick several.
  2. Choose Image, Hide, which names the number selected (Hide 3 Photos, for example). Right-clicking the selection offers the same command, and Cmd-L is the shortcut.
  3. Click Hide to confirm.

Hidden items are removed from every place in the library, including albums you added them to, and gathered in the Hidden album. To see that album, choose View, Show Hidden Photo Album; it appears in the sidebar, under Utilities on recent versions. View, Hide Hidden Photo Album takes it out of the sidebar again.

To bring a photo back, open Hidden, select it and choose Image, Unhide (Cmd-L works here too). It returns to its place in the library and its albums.

Hiding is not deleting. The photos keep their full size in the library and in iCloud, and they count toward your storage as before.

Lock the Hidden album with Touch ID or your password

Since macOS Ventura, Photos can put the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums behind authentication.

  1. In Photos, choose Photos, Settings, or press Cmd-comma.
  2. Click General.
  3. In the Privacy section, tick Use Touch ID or password. On a Mac without Touch ID the same checkbox reads Use Password.

Opening either album now brings up a Touch ID or password prompt, and turning the setting off asks for one too. Four things to know:

  • It is your Mac login password, not a separate one. Anyone who knows your login password can open Hidden.
  • Your account needs a password. The checkbox is unavailable on an account without one.
  • Recently Deleted is locked for a reason. Deleting a hidden photo moves it to Recently Deleted, where it is no longer hidden. Photos warns you about this, and the item stays there for about 30 days, showing the days left, unless you delete it from that album too.
  • macOS Monterey and earlier have no lock. The most you can do there is keep the Hidden album out of the sidebar, which anyone can undo from the View menu.

iCloud Photos, iPhone and shared albums

With iCloud Photos on, hiding syncs. A photo hidden on the Mac is hidden on your iPhone, iPad and iCloud.com as well, and the reverse.

The lock does not sync. Each device has its own switch. On iPhone and iPad it is in Settings, Photos (Settings, Apps, Photos on iOS 18 and later), under Use Face ID, Use Touch ID or Use Passcode depending on the device. Set it everywhere the library appears.

Three more places a private photo can end up:

  • iCloud itself. Under standard data protection, Apple holds the keys to iCloud Photos. Turning on Advanced Data Protection, in System Settings under your name, then iCloud, makes iCloud Photos end-to-end encrypted. Either way, anyone who gets into your Apple Account can reach iCloud.com, so two-factor authentication on the account matters as much as any Mac setting.
  • Shared albums. Adding a photo to a Shared Album sends a copy to that album. Hiding your library copy leaves the shared one where it is, so delete it from the shared album as well.
  • An iCloud Shared Photo Library. Everything in a Shared Library belongs to all its participants. Keep private photos in your Personal Library; right-clicking a shared photo offers to move it back.

What the Photos lock does not protect

The lock guards a view inside the Photos app. It does not encrypt anything.

Your library is a package in your Pictures folder, and every original sits inside it in a folder called originals. Anyone using your logged-in account can right-click the library, choose Show Package Contents and press Space on the files to preview them, hidden or not. Find the original of a photo inside the Photos library shows what is in there. The protection for those files when the Mac is off is FileVault; the protection while you are logged in is locking the screen whenever you step away.

On a Mac shared with someone else, separate user accounts do more than any album setting. Each account has its own Photos library, and a standard user cannot open yours. Setting up a Mac to share with a partner walks through it.

Private photos that are not in Photos

Plenty of private images never reach Photos. AirDrop drops them in Downloads. Screenshots land on the Desktop. Attachments saved from Mail go wherever you saved them, and pictures sent in Messages stay in the conversation, stored in your Library folder under Messages, Attachments. In Finder, all of these show as thumbnails, preview with Quick Look, turn up in Recents and are indexed by Spotlight.

Hiding the folder does not change that. A dot at the start of the name, or chflags hidden, only keeps it out of Finder’s normal view, as how to hide a folder on a Mac, and why hidden is not private explains.

The fix is to gather them into one folder and lock it. macOS can do this with an encrypted disk image made in Disk Utility. Hushbox does it in place: right-click the folder in Finder and choose Lock with Hushbox. While locked, its contents stay out of Spotlight, Finder Recents and Quick Look previews and thumbnails, and it locks again when the screen locks or the Mac sleeps. The folder’s name still shows, copies made earlier (the Messages thread, a Time Machine backup) are unchanged, and each locked item takes about 33 MB, so lock one folder of photos rather than each photo.

To move photos out of Photos and into that folder:

  1. Select them and choose File, Export, Export Unmodified Original. Save them into the folder while it is unlocked.
  2. Open a few to check they arrived intact.
  3. Delete them in Photos, then open Recently Deleted and delete them there too. With iCloud Photos on, this removes them from every device.

Questions

Where is the Hidden album on a Mac? Choose View, Show Hidden Photo Album in Photos. It then appears in the sidebar (under Utilities on recent versions), behind Touch ID or your password if the lock is on.

Can I put a password on a specific album in Photos? No. Only Hidden and Recently Deleted can be locked. For anything else, hide the photos, or export them to a folder you lock.

Do hidden photos stay hidden on my iPhone? Yes, if iCloud Photos is on. The lock is set separately on each device, so turn on Face ID or Touch ID for Photos on the iPhone as well.

Does hiding a photo delete it or free up space? No. The photo stays in the library at full size and still counts toward your Mac and iCloud storage.