How to Lock Photos on Mac with Password Easily

Jason B.
Mac O’Clock
Published in
4 min readJun 11, 2020

How to lock Photos on Mac? The Photos app is a built-in macOS app designed for photo management. If you want to prevent others from seeing your photos in the app, you can lock the Photos app. There is more than one way to do this. The method used in this article is easy to follow.

How to lock Photos on Mac in 2 steps

This part talks about how to lock apps on Mac with password. It will take the Photos app for example and show you how to do it step by step.

Step 1. Get an app locker for Mac. The one I use is AppCrypt, which is an easy-to-use, versatile app locker and website blocker for Mac.

  • Lock any apps on Mac, including pre-installed & third-party ones
  • Let you lock apps during certain times using the Schedule feature
  • Provide a report of failed attempts to launch locked apps
  • Block websites on Google Chrome & Safari
  • Offer two modes to block websites: Blacklist & Whitelist
  • Help you protect privacy
  • Help block digital distractions and improve productivity
  • Can be used for parental controls

Free download AppCrypt from the official download link and install it. Open the tool. When you launch the tool for the first time, it will ask you to provide a password. Set a password and submit it.

Note: Please do remember the password. The password will be required to:

  • set up settings.
  • successfully open a locked app.
  • unlock a locked app.
  • disable the website blocking feature.
  • remove a website from Blacklist.
  • quit AppCrypt.
  • and more…

Step 2. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, click the tool’s icon and choose Open Main Window.

Click Add App. From the Applications folder, select Photos app. Click Add. Now you will find it displayed on the left sidebar. The Photos app on your Mac is now locked.

Now let’s verify it.

Make sure AppCrypt is running. Click Photos to launch it. It won’t open. Instead, it will prompt the Please Enter Your Password box. To successfully open Photos, enter the correct password and click Submit.

What will happen if one enters a wrong password? This app locker for Mac will record the attempt to open the locked Photos. It will provide information like name of the specific app (which is Photos in this case), date, time and a photo of the person trying to access the locked app on your Mac.

The photo in this screenshot is blurred for the sake of privacy.

If you no longer want to lock Photos on Mac, you can easily unlock it. In AppCrypt, select Photos on the sidebar and click Remove App. It’s pretty easy. You can password lock it again when needed.

You can easily lock or unlock multiple apps on Mac, individually or in batch.

Tips

The steps above show you how to lock Photos on Mac easily. Here are also some tips that may help.

To make the most of the Mac app locker and effectively block access to Photos on your Mac, it’s recommended to enable Launch at system startup in Preferences. Find Preferences by clicking Menu in the top right corner of the main window.

You can easily quit a regular app on Mac by control-clicking it in the Dock and selecting Quit. To quit AppCrypt, one needs to open the tool’s main window, click Menu and select Exit. If one doesn’t know the correct password, he or she won’t be able to get rid of the app locker.

Conclusion

How to lock Photos app with password on Mac? It’s very easy to lock apps on Mac as long as you use the right tools. By locking access to Photos, you can prevent others from seeing your photos. It’s a good way to protect privacy. One can use the same app and steps to protect any apps on iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, etc.

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