Apple loves to make you nostalgic with featured photos and memories. Both iPhone the features work in tandem as “featured content” to highlight the biggest moments of your life, whether it’s an island vacation with your friends or an anniversary dinner with your spouse.

This content presented is not exclusive to the Photos app. Featured content appears on your device, such as the search page and on widgets on your home screen.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you realize that you may have old or embarrassing images scattered throughout your library that could potentially appear unwarranted anywhere other than your library.

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Seeing those unexpected photos appear randomly on your iPhone, especially if you’re showing something to someone or if someone else is using your phone, can become a headache…which luckily you can avoid.

If you want to prevent unexpected or embarrassing photos from randomly appearing on your iPhone, here’s how to stop it.

While you are here, check the 7 changes to make when installing iOS 18 And how to disable the most annoying Apple Intelligence feature.

You can show a person less frequently or not at all

If someone is featured prominently in your photo library, iOS will consider them an important person in your life. This person will definitely appear in your memories and photos on your device. For most, it’s a joyful experience, reliving precious memories with your favorite people.

If things aren’t that valuable anymore and you’re no longer talking to this person, you probably don’t want to see their face randomly pop up on your phone. Sure, you can go through your camera roll and go through every photo and video that has that person in it, but that’s a lot of work. Fortunately, there is an easy way to hide photos of a specific person.

To feature a person less frequently or not at all in Memories, Photos, and Widgets, open the Photos app, find a photo or video with the person you want to stream less often, tap the icon three dot menu button at the top right, then tap “Feature this person less.”

You can now choose from two options:

• Introduce this person less: You won’t see any individual photos or videos of that person in Memories or Featured Photos, but if that person is in a group photo, they may still appear.
• Never introduce this person: You will not see any photos or videos with this person, including group photos.

You can also turn off Memories and Featured Photos completely

Now not everyone’s unexpected photo will be of an ex-spouse or former friend. An embarrassing photo of yourself or something inappropriate may appear somewhere on your phone, and if you’re worried about that happening, you might just want to get rid of the memories and present photos altogether.

In the Settings app, go to Applications > Photos and deactivate Show featured content. This will stop all content presented on your device, including albums in the Photos app, widgets on your home screen, and photos in Search.

Other Tips You Can Follow to Prevent Unexpected Photos from Appearing

What I’ve detailed above is a good start for preventing certain photos from appearing on your device, but there’s more you can do, especially if both tips don’t really do it for you.

• You can hide collections in the Photos app. Starting with iOS 18, you can now hide certain collections that can preview photos you don’t necessarily want to see. In Photosgo to Customize and rearrange and check the collections you want to hide. These collections include Recent days, People and pets, Travel and more. If you have disabled Featured Content, you will notice that some collections are grayed out.
• You can turn off vacation memories. If you don’t want to see memories of recent holiday events, like Christmas or Thanksgiving, you can go to Settings > Applications > Photos and deactivate View Holiday Events.
• You can prevent photos from appearing in search. If you type something into the search, you may see some photos pop up. You can prevent this from happening by going to Settings > Applications > Photos and deactivate Show app in search And Show content in search.

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If you want to learn more about iOS, check out how to get more storage on iPhone with these two tips And why the iPhone 16 camera control button is also a secret action button.