Lock and View for Apple Photos
Apple's Guided Access feature, while useful, has some limitations that hinder its effectiveness in certain situations. Although it allows disabling parts of the screen and controlling enabled actions, fully preventing other actions can be difficult.
Tailored for Apple Photos, the proposed Lock and View feature draws inspiration from Guided Access while addressing its shortcomings. It allows users to keep the Photo app open while blocking actions that would navigate away from it. Features like sharing, haptic touch, and free browsing within the Photos app are disabled.
Lock and View offers a solution for Apple Photos that suits different scenarios, like entertaining a child or sharing travel photos with a curious individual. It safeguards your pictures and lets you control who can see them.
Issue — Guided Access disables the screen and prevents actions from taking place, but it isn’t a comprehensive solution. Experiencing first hand needing the ability to disable actions on the Photos app, I set out to design a solution that addresses outstanding concerns.
Target User — Parents and guardians needing to distract their little ones by giving them their devices but not wanting to give them screen time. Users handing their phone to another individual to show them pictures but being worried about them swiping too far.
01
The Process
The concept for this idea originated during a far too difficult diaper change on a very passionate baby. It became very apparent that showing my baby videos and pictures of herself on my phone calmed her down enough to complete the diaper change.
I initially used Guided Access on the Photos app — I would find a relatively long video of herself, disable the entire screen, disable the volume and power button, and hand the phone back to my baby. It worked, but if I needed longer than the video played for, chaos ensued; the screen was disabled, I had wipes in one hand, and needed to make sure my baby didn’t flip over trying to unlock Guided Access and restart the process.
After being fed up with Guided Access, I tried just handing her the phone without any restrictions and hoped she would stay on the Photos app. When I went back to see the aftermath, she had deleted photos and videos, almost shared pictures with people in my contacts, and opened up 5 different apps, all with their own half baked actions being one click away from being completed.
I started thinking about what I liked about Guided Access and what gaps were still in the experience and eventually landed on the concept of Lock and View.
My solution locks the phone on the Photos app, disables all extra actions such as sharing capabilities and free browsing abilities, and only allows the pictures and videos selected for Lock and View to be visible.
02
The Solution
Lock and View —
Toolbar Access
Similar to how users can add photos to their favorites album by interacting with the heart from the photo toolbar, Lock and View utilizes the same functionality for users to add photos and videos that will be available when a user enables Lock and View in the Photos app. Hitting the lock icon saves the picture/video, making it available when Lock and View is active.
Haptic Touch
While Guided Access is activated by hitting the phone’s power button three times, activating Lock and View on Photos can be done easily from the home screen. Using haptic touch, users can see the added option of Lock and View.
Feature Disable
When setting up the screen disable boundary on Guided Access, users have the ability to disable the whole screen or create custom areas on the screen that are enabled or disabled. Even with the available customization, users can still find ways to exit out of the app, browse through all photos, or trigger an event that allows one to share photos. When Lock and View is enabled, all extra icons and functions are disabled and hidden, so the only action available for the user is to swipe left and right on the existing, curated gallery.
03
Future Considerations
All things considered, this solution does seem like overkill, especially knowing that Guided Access is already a feature implemented into Apple’s software and is usable across different apps. The reason why I felt this was necessary to explore was because this concept does fill the gaps that are left by the existing Guided Access experience. Our photo gallery more often than not contains sensitive material of various natures and the last thing any of us want is for the material to accidentally be viewed by or sent to someone else accidentally.
Though this concept was created for parents / guardians to help with distracting their children without having to give in to screen time and keeping their content safe, there are use cases that extend beyond a tool for parenting. We all know someone who has a tendency to swipe left and right after being given a phone to simply view one picture. It may feel ridiculous going to extra mile to enable Lock and View for that specific scenario, but knowing there is a way to safeguard your content brings peace of mind no matter the situation one finds themselves in.
The way to make this feature better is by embedding it and customizing it so it works in other apps. For example, the Camera app can have a version where the full toolset of the camera isn’t available. If a child accidentally presses record on the camera, the last thing you want is a 25 minute 4K video saved in your camera roll eating up your entire storage.
The encompassing theme here is a deep dive into what Parental Controls look like on iOS and what a future state of what those controls can look like. Handing a phone to a child without any safeguards and protections is setting one up for a headache that could have been avoided by spending a few extra minutes to set up parental controls.