Well this is interesting. I plugged my phone into my computer to pull some photos off of it and I just happen to start browsing it via Windows Explorer since the device shows up there. Imagine my surprise when I saw things that were in my Hidden folder show up clear as day. It seems that lock is only at an application level and just browsing the file system it’s there to see.
Does anyone else experience something similar? Is there a note I missed that it’s still be available via other means?
I reverse engineered the Apple Photos library file on my Mac as a side project and can confirm that hidden assets are not actually encrypted or otherwise protected. The respective assets are just not shown in the apps and can be accessed via Finder on macOS.
I didn’t know they were visible when you connect your phone to your PC but I guess it makes sense.
No need for reverse engineering - it has already been done: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
Thanks for sharing, actually this very project inspired me to do it myself. It is an incredible resource when it comes to certain aspects of the database format!
Imho it has some deeper architectural issues though which I wanted to avoid in my implementation. I’m also using an entirely different tech stack I wanted to train myself in.
My implementation is not as feature complete as osxphotos but I’m sure I will be able to contribute back to the project with the occasional bug fix.
The device shows up there because you connected to your computer and trusted the connection on your iPhone (and you had to type in your passcode to confirm.) If someone doesn’t know your passcode they can’t do this. If they do know it, they could access your photos anyway.
It’s probably worth filing a Feedback report to request Hidden photos don’t get served up over the standard file system access alongside the rest of your library. You can do so by typing applefeedback:// into Safari and hitting return. If you’re on a developer or public beta, you can simply use the Feedback app instead.
That makes sense but the one difference I see is the hidden/deleted folders are Face ID locked and you need to be present to access them at the time. Just having the passcode can get you in to the phone but not to those folders, yet all you need is the passcode for file system access.
I’ll report it via the method you suggested too.
Not to discount this frustration, but you can absolutely access the hidden photos with just the passcode. Try it.
Huh… TIL. You just have to fail it like 4-5 times and it switches to a passcode prompt.
Hidden is not encrypted and when you trust the computer you’re connecting to you have access to the phone’s file system.
Not a bug, a design choice to allow accessing your device photos on an attached computer.
I know hidden is not encrypted, but the level things can be hidden can vary too. You can have parts of the filesystem that are not shown to the USB driver without additional authentication pretty easily.
Personally I like the way that this is implemented; makes it easy to download hidden media files onto my Mac. Anyways, if you’re worried about nudes/pr0n being seen by unauthorized parties, I wouldn’t recommend stashing them in your photos library anyways. There are vault-type apps in the App Store that masquerade as note/calculator apps (Calculator# comes to mind) which are more suited to addressing OP’s use case.
