How To Get iPhone Photos

The latest software update for the iPhone released a long-awaited "hidden album" feature to the Photos app. If you're looking for this feature, you will NOT find it if you're not part of the Beta software program. This feature can be seen in the last couple generations of iPhone with the latest update to iOS Beta 5 (Public Beta, that is to say).

To find the "Hidden Album" feature on your iPhone, go to your Settings app. Drop in to Settings, scroll to "Photos", and access "Hidden Album." When enabled, Hidden Album "will appear in the Albums tab, under Utilities." If activated, the Hidden album is always available in the image picker.

There's no absolute guarantee that this feature will be present in the final build of iOS 14. For now, it's present in the latest public beta, and only available to those devices that've opted in to the public beta program as such.

This is not the only way to access a so-called "hidden album" of photos on an iPhone. There are plenty of ways in which to replicate the behavior of this feature with 3rd-party apps, apps that've been available in the app store for years.

If you happen upon the Hidden Album feature on a phone run/owned by a friend or loved one, note that this feature MAY be available by default in the near future. It's not necessarily something that users will have to opt-in to. The appearance of this feature on an iPhone (once iOS 14 goes live for all) is not, in itself, a suspicious thing to find. Everyone is more than likely going to have said Hidden Album feature on their iPhone eventually!

That said, we've yet to explore the implications of a media album that can be hidden in iOS at system level. Stick around as we see how this all works, from top to bottom!