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The Spotlight function of the iPhone allows us to save steps, and consequently time, when searching for applications on our mobile. However, the famous search engine sometimes offers more information than we want. The latter happens specifically when searching Photos, showing a random selection, which could be those that we prefer to keep hidden. To prevent your photos from appearing when searching in Spotlight, iOS offers a setting to avoid this risk.
Of course, the solution involves showing all or nothing. In this case nothing. Setting it up removes all photos from Spotlight, not hiding or deleting them. This prevents Spotlight from displaying in your Photos app when you’re running a search.
- Go to Settings.
- Tap Siri and Search.
- Find in the list of apps and tap Photos.
- Move the Show content in search slider to off/on.
To increase protection against photos appearing unexpectedly, you can also move the sliders for Show on Home Screen and Tip Notifications to On/Off as well.
How to hide specific photos in Spotlight?
Of course not all of us are lovers of extreme solutions. Therefore, there is also a solution to hide specific photos to allow others to appear. Which is probably the most common scenario. But this must be done directly from the Photos app.
- Open the Photos app and find the photo or photos you want to hide.
- To hide a single photo, tap it. If you’re hiding multiple photos, tap Select and tap each one.
- Tap the share box (the box with the arrow coming out of it).
- Tap Hide.
How do I turn off photo suggestions?
When you search Spotlight, iOS may suggest photos to us based on your behavior, location, and other factors. If you do not want to receive these suggestions, you must also disable them manually.* Press Settings > Siri & Search > Photos.* Once in suggestions there are three options to deactivate.* Show on home screen: Turn this option off to prevent the Photos app from being suggested on your iPhone’s home screen and when the phone is locked.* Suggest Application: if you turn this option off, your iPhone won’t automatically prompt you to check out the contents of the Photos app.* Suggestion notifications: Disabling this prevents iPhone from sending you notifications for content in Photos, such as new memory albums that the phone has created for you.
How to edit Spotlight search?
In addition to the Photos results, there may be results from other apps that we don’t want to appear. It’s worth taking advantage of the same menu and setting changes here, as they all have to be done manually and it’s not possible to clear your entire Spotlight search history on an iPhone running iOS 15 or later.
Scroll down to the list of apps and tap the app whose content you want to remove from Spotlight search results.
- Go to Settings.
- Tap Siri and Search.
- Move the Show content in search slider to off/on.
- You can even control whether the app, not its content, appears in search results by moving the Show app in search slider to on/off.
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