Peek-a-View keeps all your photos safe from your kid's inquisitive fingers

Photos on iPhone (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

A new app will prevent people from deleting your photos by accident.
It'll stop them from browsing all of your albums, too.
The app was designed with kids in mind.

Sometimes the best apps are borne out of a very specific, often niche requirement that then turns out to be of mass appeal. That's the category I'd put this app in. Peek-a-View does one thing and it does it well – it allows you to give your phone to someone and know that they won't do anything untoward with your photos.

Developer Casey Liss explains why the app came about in its announcement blog post, and it's something that will instantly be familiar to anyone with young children.

When the Liss family visited Disney World and found that the only way to entertain a young child was to give her a phone full of photos, alarm bells rang.

Ever-so-independent, even just shy of two years old, Mikaela had strong opinions about everything when she was willing to ride in the stroller. After a few days at Disney, my wife and I discovered what would calm her down: browsing the Photos app on our phones, looking at the pictures we had taken on the trip so far.This was utterly terrifying.Photos isn't really designed for this, and makes it possible — if not easy — to delete or edit photos. Given that these were the only copies of photos we had taken on the trip, I was scared that Mikaela would accidentally delete one or more of them.Once we got home from our trip, I knew which app I wanted to write.

Peek A View App Icon (Image credit: Casey Liss)

The result is an app that allows you to select a particular album and then limit a user to just those photos. Once you give them your phone they can't see anything that isn't in the album you specified. And importantly, they can't delete anything. If you employ Guided Access, they won't be able to switch away from Peek-a-View, either.

The obvious use here is for children, but the app could be used in all kinds of instances. Showing colleagues photos from the office party without them seeing photos of your kids, for example. Or ensuring your friends don't see photos of your secret Transformers collection when you show them your hot new car. You get the idea.

You can download Peek-a-View from the App Store for free right now. There's an optional in-app purchase to remove the 20-photo limit of the free version and unlock additional app icons, too.

It's worth downloading Peek-a-View just for those icons!

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.