You can hide sensitive images from your Photos app’s Camera Roll by moving them to the app’s Hidden album, but it doesn’t take much for someone with access to your handset to find the Hidden album and start perusing through the images it contains.
With this caveat in mind, iOS developer Menuska has released a new free jailbreak tweak called FaceID for Hidden Photos that adds a biometric authentication requirement to the Photos app’s Hidden album. With it, you’ll need to pass a Face ID authentication test to access the Hidden album’s contents, as shown in the screenshot example below:
The benefits this tweak brings to the table are rather obvious — no one can open the Photos app’s Hidden album besides you, which offers piece of mind for those who might be trying to keep certain images out of sight and out of mind.
As the developer notes in the tweak description, FaceID for Hidden Photos merely adds the NSFaceIDUsageDescription key to the Photos app’s Info.plist file to achieve this result, and while it is effective, this change cannot be undone by uninstalling FaceID for Hidden Photos from your jailbroken handset. The developer says he’s working on a fix for this in a future update, but there’s no ETA for that.
Based on our opinion of the tweak, FaceID for Hidden Photos offers a useful functionality improvement for anxious individuals, and improves privacy in a department where Apple clearly fell short.
If you’re interested in trying FaceID for Hidden Photos, then you can download it for free from Menuska’s beta repository in Cydia or Sileo. The tweak supports all jailbroken iOS 11 and 12 devices with Face ID capabilities.
If you aren’t already using Menuska’s beta repository, then you can add it to your package manager of choice with the following URL:
https://repo.menushka.ca/
Will you be installing FaceID for Hidden Photos? Discuss why or why not in the comments section below.
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