MELANCHOLY404 TECHNOLOGY

No matter how much you trust your friends, I bet your heart skips a beat when you hand over your phone to someone else. Your phone is personal, and we’ve told you many ways topassword protect apps and encrypt files. But there’s a simple way to stop your friends from swiping way too far to the right and seeing photos they weren’t meant to see.

Friends are pesky that way. Use the apps listed below to pre-select photos you want them to see and to prevent them from accidentally seeing the ones you don’t.

Bound It’s homescreen shows all available albums/folders filled with photos on your phone. Tap on the thumbnails of the photos you want to share (between multiple folders and albums) with your friends and tap Bound It! This will generate a fullscreen album-like view that’s external to the Bound It app, only containing the photos you selected.

 

Now, when you hand over your phone to your friend, they will scroll through the photos you’ve selected and they’ll hit a dead end after the last photo you chose to share.

Just like music playlists, the app allows you to save photo lists of selected images. Select the thumbnails and then tap the Save Photo lists button on the top right, indicated by a floppy disk icon. The app itself can also be password protected.

Of course, this doesn’t hide all the other photos. Your friends can easily open the gallery app for that. But you won’t let them, will you?

As I said, this will only work if you’re hovering over your friends and don’t allow them to open another app on your phone. If your friends are smart enough, all they need to do is go to the multi-tasking menu to know you’re pulling a fast one on them. But most of them won’t.

More importantly, both Bound It and this next app fulfill their specific purpose, which is to save you from any accidental swiping horrors.

Once you grant Overswipe access to your photos, the app will list all the photos in your Camera Roll in a chronological order with the latest sorted on top.

 

Same as Bound It, tap thumbnails of the photos you want to showcase and then tap theDisplay button below. And you’ll be directly taken to the fullscreen photo view.

Hand over your phone to your friends and it will be just like you’re in the Photos app.

 

Overswipe’s free app only lets you showcase 5 photos at a time. You can upgrade to Overswipe Pro for $0.99 to remove the limit and to gain password protection.