How to lock notes on iPhone with a password or Face ID

You can set this up in advance from Settings, or simply lock your first note and follow the prompts.

1. 1Open Settings, then Apps, then Notes (on iOS 17 and earlier it is Settings → Notes).
2. 2Tap Password. If you have more than one account in Notes, pick the one you want — usually iCloud or On My iPhone.
3. 3Choose Use iPhone Passcode, or Use Custom Password to create a password just for Notes. A password hint is optional but strongly recommended for a custom password.
4. 4Turn on Face ID (or Touch ID) if you want to open locked notes without typing.

Using your iPhone passcode is convenient: one code, nothing new to remember. The downside is that anyone who knows your phone's passcode — a family member, someone who watched you type it — can open your locked notes too.

A custom Notes password closes that gap, because it is different from the code you type dozens of times a day in front of other people. The price is that you have to remember it. Apple cannot recover it, and that matters more than it sounds (see below).

If the notes are about things only you should read — account recovery codes, medical details, a private journal — a custom password is the better choice.

1. 1Open the note in the Notes app.
2. 2Tap the More button (the circle with three dots) and choose Lock.
3. 3Enter your passcode or Notes password, or use Face ID when prompted.

A lock icon now appears next to the note. To read it, tap the note and then View Note, and unlock it. Once unlocked, all your locked notes stay open for a short while; tap the lock icon at the top of the note, or close the Notes app, to lock them again right away. Locking a note does not delete it: to remove the lock completely, open the note, tap More and choose Remove.

Locking protects the body of the note, not its existence. Before you rely on it, know these limits:

• The note's title — its first line — stays visible in the notes list. Put a neutral title on the first line, such as “Personal”, and keep the details below it.
• Search only finds locked notes by their title, not by their content.
• Some notes cannot be locked: notes shared with other people, notes with tags, and notes with certain attachments (such as video, audio or PDFs). Notes stored in a Gmail or other non-iCloud account also cannot be locked.
• Photos you add to a locked note are inside the note, but if you inserted them from your library, the originals are still in Photos. Delete those separately and empty Recently Deleted — see how to permanently delete photos on iPhone.

If you use your iPhone passcode, there is nothing extra to forget. With a custom password, it is different: you can reset the Notes password from Settings → Apps → Notes → Password → Reset Password, but the new password only applies to notes you lock from now on. Notes that were locked with the old password stay locked with the old password. If you cannot remember it, those notes cannot be opened.

Practical habits:

• Always add a password hint that means something only to you.
• Write the password down and keep it somewhere physical and safe, or store it in a password manager — see how to store passwords safely on your phone.
• For anything you cannot afford to lose, keep a second copy somewhere you control.

For a lot of things, yes. Locked notes are encrypted, and with a custom password they are separate from your phone's passcode. They are less suited to large numbers of photos or files, notes that need tags or attachments that cannot be locked, or keeping everything private in one place. For photos, the Hidden album is the other built-in option, covered in how to hide photos on iPhone.

Lockboxy keeps private notes, photos, files and passwords together in one encrypted vault. Everything is encrypted with AES-256 on the device, behind its own passcode that is separate from your iPhone passcode, and there is no account and no server that holds your content.

• Private Notes are encrypted and autosaved, and you can browse them by month and year; the whole note is locked, not just its body.
• Notes, the Wallet and private contacts are unlimited on the free plan (see how to hide contacts on iPhone); the free plan stores up to 30 photos/videos and 10 files.
• The same vault can hold the photos and documents a note refers to, so they are not left in your library.

The same trade-off as a custom Notes password applies: the key comes from your passcode, so a forgotten passcode means the vault cannot be opened, unless you created a Recovery Key (Premium) beforehand. More answers are in the Lockboxy FAQ.