Your Photo Widget or Notification Showed Something Private

Hidlet is an iPhone app

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You put your phone on the table at dinner. It lights up with a message, and the whole preview sits there for the person across from you to read. Or you open your Home Screen to show a friend something, and the Photos widget picks that moment to show a picture you meant to keep to yourself.

None of this is a hack. These are features doing what they were built to do. This guide goes through the five places an iPhone shows content without you asking, what each setting does, and what to do about photos you never want on a screen.

Notification previews

A preview is the text of the message inside the notification. Apple says previews can include text from Messages, lines from Mail messages and details about Calendar invitations.

You choose when they appear in Settings → Notifications → Show Previews:

• Always. Previews appear on the Lock Screen, even when the iPhone is locked.
• When Unlocked. Previews appear only after the iPhone is unlocked.
• Never. Previews never appear on the Lock Screen.

The catch with When Unlocked (our reasoning, not Apple’s wording). Apple says previews appear once the iPhone is unlocked. Face ID unlocks quickly when you look at the phone, so if someone is next to you when that happens, they can read the preview too. If the people around you matter, Never is the stricter choice.

You can also set this app by app. In Settings → Notifications, tap an app under Notification Style, then tap Show Previews if it appears. Apple notes that not every app supports previews. For the whole Lock Screen, you can choose how notifications are shown: Count shows only the number of notifications, Stack groups them by app, and List shows them in a list.

Widgets on the Lock Screen

Apple says you can make features such as widgets and Control Center available on the Lock Screen for easy access. On the Lock Screen, swiping right shows more widgets.

That convenience is the catch. Apple’s own example is an upcoming event in the Calendar widget: if someone has your iPhone, they can see it.

To close this, go to Settings → Face ID & Passcode (it’s Touch ID & Passcode on models with Touch ID) and turn off what you don’t want below Allow Access When Locked. Apple also says the trade-off is yours: you lose quick access to the information as well.

The Photos widget

The Photos widget shows pictures from your library, and Apple says Photos can pick them as featured photos and memories automatically. A photo you would never post can come up at the wrong moment, for example on the Home Screen.

You have three controls:

1. Turn off featured content. Open Photos, tap Collections, tap your account in the top-right corner, and turn off Show Featured Content. Apple says this stops Photos from generating featured photos and memories, and it applies to the widget on your Home Screen too. Photos that other people sent you can also show up under For You; Why Photos Others Send Show Up in Your iPhone Photos App covers that switch.
2. Show a person less. Open a photo of the person, tap Don’t Feature a Person in the photo’s menu, then choose Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person.
3. Hide the photo. Apple says photos in the Hidden album don’t appear in the Library, in other albums or in the Photos widget. In Photos, touch and hold the photo, tap Hide, then confirm. The hidden photo is kept out of the widget. A copy of it that isn’t hidden is not.

StandBy

StandBy turns the iPhone into a bedside clock, a photo frame or a display for widgets. Apple says it starts when the iPhone is on the Lock Screen, charging, on its side and stationary. On models with the Always-On display, it stays on.

That makes it a screen on a shelf or a desk that anyone can read. Apple’s StandBy page doesn’t say whether photos or widgets stay hidden until you unlock. We therefore treat them as visible (our reasoning, so check how yours behaves with a test photo).

In Settings → StandBy you can do three things:

• Turn StandBy off with its switch.
• Turn off Show Notifications, so no notifications appear while it runs.
• Turn on Show Preview on Tap Only (it sits with Show Notifications), which Apple says keeps details hidden until you tap.

Lock the app that holds the secret

Apple lets you lock an app so it asks for Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode every time. Touch and hold the app on the Home Screen and tap Require Face ID. Apple says information inside a locked app won’t appear in other places such as CarPlay, notification previews, search, Siri suggestions or your call history.

It is a good fit for a messaging app where one chat is private. It doesn’t change what other apps show.

Keep private photos out of the library

Every fix above works around the same fact: the photo is in your library, and the library feeds widgets, memories and featured photos. The cleaner fix is to not keep the photo there.

A vault keeps photos in its own encrypted storage, so Photos has nothing to show on a widget. Hidlet works this way. You import photos into a vault with the + button, and Hidlet then offers to delete the originals from Photos. Deleted photos then stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days, so empty that too. Hidlet is available on the App Store.

What Hidlet can and can’t protect

Hidlet protects photos that are inside a vault. Leaving the app locks it at once, and the app-switcher preview is covered, so a photo doesn’t show there. Photos you take with Hidlet’s camera go straight into the open vault, not to the camera roll.

It can’t change what other apps show. It can’t hide a copy you left in your photo library, and it doesn’t control your notification settings or your widgets. Use the steps above for those.