How to stop private photos showing up in memories on Android

A memory is a small kindness most of the time: a year-ago beach photo, a slideshow of a friend’s birthday. Then one day it surfaces an ex, a hospital visit or a document scan, on your home screen, during a meeting. Memories are made automatically from your whole library, so the fix is to tell the app what to leave out, or to take those photos out of the library entirely.

The steps below follow the official help for the most common Android photo backup app. Other gallery apps have similar settings with different names. If a menu doesn’t match, search the app’s settings for “memories”.

Hide a person or pet

If the photos you’d rather not see are all of one person, hide that person.

1. Open the gallery app and tap your profile picture or the menu.
2. Open Photos settings, then Preferences, then Memories.
3. Tap Hide faces (sometimes “Hide people and pets”).
4. Tap each face you want to hide.

Hidden people stop appearing in featured memories, including group photos they’re part of. The app needs face grouping to be on for this to work, and it may miss some photos.

Hide dates

Dates are more reliable than faces. They suit events: a funeral, a breakup, a stay in hospital.

1. In the same Memories settings, tap Hide dates.
2. Add a single day or a range.

Photos taken on those dates won’t be featured in memories.

Remove one memory or one photo

If a single memory catches you out:

1. Open the memory.
2. Tap More (three dots), then Hide.
3. Choose whether to hide the whole memory or only the photo you’re looking at.

The same menu offers to hide that date from all future memories.

Turn memories off

If you’d rather not be surprised at all, the Memories settings let you turn featured memories off, and the app’s notification settings let you stop memory alerts. You lose the nice ones too, but nothing appears without your asking.

What hiding from memories doesn’t do

Hiding is a display setting, not a privacy lock. The photos are still:

• in your main grid, search and albums,
• in your cloud backup, if backup is on,
• visible to anyone holding your unlocked phone,
• available to apps you’ve given access to all your photos.

If someone else uses your phone, or the photos are ones you’d hate to show by accident, hiding from memories isn’t enough.

Take the photos out of the library

Photos that aren’t in the main library can’t be turned into memories. On Android you have three ways to do that:

• A locked folder in your gallery app. Photos in it don’t appear in the grid, search, albums or memories, but it opens with your screen lock. Check its backup setting first, as explained in how to hide photos on Android.
• Private space on Android 15 and later, which keeps a whole app and its photos sealed off. See Android private space explained.
• A vault app with its own lock.

If memories have ever popped up while you were presenting, the screen sharing scenario covers how to share only what you mean to.

Silo, coming soon to iPhone and Android, imports chosen photos into an encrypted vault with its own PIN, and checks each copy before it offers to remove the original from your gallery. Photos in Silo can’t appear in memories, widgets or the photo picker.