How to hide and lock photos on a Mac

Hiding photos on a Mac works differently depending on whether your pictures live inside the Apple Photos app or sit as loose image files inside Finder folders. It also depends on one question: does anyone else in your house or office know your Mac login password?

Four ways to hide or lock photos on a Mac, compared

Method 1: Hide photos in the macOS Photos app (Command + L)

According to Apple’s macOS Photos User Guide, hiding inside the Photos app takes four steps:

1. Open the Photos app on your Mac and select the photo or video thumbnails you want to hide.
2. Press Command + L on your keyboard (or Control-⁠click the selection and choose Hide Photo), then click Hide to confirm.
3. To view your hidden items later, click View in the top menu bar and choose Show Hidden Photo Album, then click Hidden under Utilities in the sidebar and unlock with Touch ID or your Mac password.
4. When you finish viewing, click View in the top menu bar and choose Hide Hidden Photo Album so the Hidden entry disappears from the sidebar again.

Unlike on iPhone (where Hidden is visible in Utilities by default), Apple Support notes that on a Mac the Hidden album is hidden from the sidebar by default until you turn it on under the View menu. Still, anyone sitting at your unlocked Mac who knows your login password can click View > Show Hidden Photo Album and open it.

Method 2: Lock a folder of photos on Mac with an encrypted Disk Image

Unlike Windows or iOS, macOS ships with a genuine cryptographic container tool built straight into the operating system: Disk Utility. According to Apple’s Disk Utility User Guide, you can turn any Finder folder of photos into an encrypted virtual disk with its own password:

• Open Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and choose File > New Image > Image from Folder (or Blank Image if you want a resizable sparsebundle you can add photos to over time).
• Pick 128-⁠bit AES encryption (fast and strong) or 256-⁠bit AES encryption and enter a strong passphrase you can check in our unlock strength calculator.
• Critical step: uncheck “Remember password in my keychain”. If you leave that box ticked, macOS unlocks the disk image automatically for anyone logged into your Mac user account, defeating the entire point of a separate password.
• Once the .dmg or .sparsebundle is verified, delete the original unencrypted folder and empty the Mac Trash. Remember to eject the mounted volume in Finder when you finish looking at your photos so it locks again.

Stopping private iPhone photos from syncing onto a shared Mac

Many people end up searching “how to hide photos on Mac” because a photo they took on their iPhone suddenly appeared on a family MacBook signed in to the same Apple Account.

When iCloud Photos is enabled, hiding the photo on your iPhone hides it on the Mac too, yet it still copies the file onto that Mac behind the Mac’s login password. If you want phone photos never to reach iCloud or any computer at all, move them out of Apple Photos on your iPhone into a local encrypted vault app, delete the originals from Apple Photos, and clear Recently Deleted.