Locked and private content

Locked keeps photos and videos private without moving them anywhere. A locked item stays in its albums, stacks, favourites and tags, but it’s hidden everywhere until you unlock your session with your PIN.

Locking is just a label. It never changes an item’s albums, stack, favourites, tags, faces or place in the timeline or archive, and unlocking puts it back exactly where it was.

It’s useful for anything you’d rather not have on screen during normal browsing: medical photos, prescriptions, card or bank images, identity documents, private family photos, personal records.

Note

Locked reduces accidental exposure in Frameleaf. It isn’t a backup, and it isn’t a substitute for full-disk encryption, strong passwords or limiting who can get onto the server. AI results can be wrong, so review them, and keep regular backups.

Set up your PIN

Locked uses a six-digit PIN. Create it in Settings, then Access & security, then Locked folder PIN, where you can also change or clear it.

Forgotten your PIN? Choose Forgot your PIN? and enter your account password to clear it; your locked items stay locked. If password sign-in is turned off on your server, ask your administrator to clear it.

Lock a photo

• Select photos and choose Mark Sensitive in the selection bar, or use Mark Sensitive in the viewer.
• Mark it sensitive while reviewing it in the Info panel.
• Upload straight into Locked.
• In the mobile apps, select photos you own and mark them as NSFW.

Locking doesn’t need your PIN, because it only hides things. Unlocking an item does.

Stacks and Live Photos lock as a whole. Locking one photo in a stack locks the whole stack, and the video part of a Live Photo locks with its photo.

Why an item is locked

Every locked item has exactly one lock, which records why:

Reason	How it got there
Marked	You locked it yourself, with Mark Sensitive, a sensitive review, an upload into Locked, or an older app’s “Move to Locked folder”
Detected	Sensitive-content detection flagged it while hiding is turned on
Moved from old Locked folder	It was in the old Locked folder when your library was upgraded to Frameleaf

Unlock your session

Use the lock control in the main navigation, near Upload. Unlocking asks for your PIN.

• Locked: sensitive content is hidden.
• Unlocked: this session can see it. Locking again hides it straight away and refreshes what’s on screen.

Unlocking applies to the current session only. Signing out, or using another browser or app, needs your PIN again.

Who sees a locked item

Who	What they see
You, while locked	Nothing. It’s left out of the timeline, albums, search, the map, memories, people, pets and downloads.
You, after unlocking	Everything, as normal, plus the Locked view that lists every locked item.
Partners, album and space members	Never, whatever their own session.
Shared links	Never.
Administrators	Never, in the app.
Server jobs	Always. Thumbnails, machine learning, backups and restorations still process locked items.

Your own devices still sync locked items, marked as locked, so they stay hidden there too.

A bulk change you start while locked skips any item that was locked after you started it.

Revealed for this session

Once you unlock, every locked item, and everything your Locked rules hide, behaves like any other item, everywhere, for you:

• Search finds them, including smart search, text in photos and Ask, and includes them in counts and suggestions.
• Library views show and count them: the timeline, archive, Explore, memories, people and pets, Best Photos, duplicates, albums, the map, tags and folders.
• Actions work on them: favourite, archive, add to album, change date or location, delete and download. Studio can place them in a project, use one as a project’s poster and export them.

They still never reach anyone else. Sharing a revealed item isn’t offered, and a revealed item never becomes an album cover, a featured photo or a profile picture, because those are shown whatever the session.

When you lock again, they keep every place and connection they have, such as albums, stacks, tags, people, memories and Studio projects, but show nowhere, as before.

Covers and featured photos

A locked photo is never an album, collection or space cover, a person’s or pet’s featured photo, a face thumbnail or a profile picture. Locking a photo releases every such use, and each falls back to another photo, Best Photos first, or to none.

Memories

Memories are made from locked items too. A memory that contains even one hidden item is hidden entirely while you’re locked: its title, date, cover, places and counts, everywhere memories appear, and its exports. Once you unlock, it shows normally with all its photos. So a title or place taken from a locked photo never shows while you’re locked.

Studio

While unlocked, you can use any of your locked items in a Studio project like any other. When you lock again:

• The project keeps them. The editor hides those clips entirely, rather than showing them as missing, and saving keeps them in the project.
• A poster taken from a locked item stays set, but the project shows a placeholder instead.
• An export made from a locked item is hidden, with its library item, its download and any share of it, until you unlock. Its library item takes the lock of its sources, and loses it once its last locked source is unlocked. An export you locked yourself stays locked.
• A project bundle you download while unlocked carries your revealed items’ files if you include media, and is hidden while you’re locked. Made while locked, it carries a locked item as a bare reference only.

The Locked view

Open Locked after unlocking. It lists every locked item, newest first, together with the items your Locked rules hide, with a filter:

• All (the default), including Locked rule matches
• Moved from old Locked folder
• Marked
• Detected

Each tile is badged Locked (moved from the old folder) or Sensitive (marked, detected or matched by a rule).

To unlock items, select them and choose Unmark Sensitive. This also records them as reviewed and safe, so running detection again won’t lock them again. You can still add locked items to albums, download them, change their date or location, or delete them permanently from here.

Locked rules

Some content is private without being explicit, like medical photos, legal documents or a private project. Locked rules let you choose people, pets and tags to hide from your own sessions until you unlock.

Set them in Settings, then Access & security, then Locked tags & people. The rules themselves are hidden until you unlock, and can only be changed while you’re unlocked.

• Apply Locked rules to either My photos and videos or All photos and videos I can access.
• A tag inside a locked tag is locked too, and the list says so.
• A tag, person or pet that no longer exists stays in your rules, marked unavailable, until you remove it. Saving another change never unlocks it.
• If your rules were changed in another tab or device since you opened them, your changes stay on screen and saving waits until you reload the latest rules.
• If your session locks before you save, your changes are dropped and you’re asked to unlock again.

Items that match a rule appear under All in the Locked view. They have no lock to remove: they leave Locked when you change your rules.

Rules and what you’ve shared

A Locked rule also stops you sharing matching items one by one. A matching item can’t be shared with a person, and someone you already shared it with stops seeing it, for as long as the rule applies.

But a rule doesn’t take back what you’ve shared on purpose. An item in a shared album or space, a partner share or a shared link stays visible there. To stop sharing it, remove it from the album or link, stop partner sharing, or lock the item itself. A locked item never reaches anyone else.

Tag names are visible

People you share an item with can see the tags on it, including a tag you use in a Locked rule. This includes album and space members, partners and shared links that show metadata. People’s names work differently: everyone sees only the names they gave.

Partners’ devices

If you share your library with a partner, their app is still sent a locked item, marked locked, so a phone that already had it hides it instead of keeping an old copy. Its file name, preview, location and other photo details are blanked. Its ID, checksum, capture date and time, media type, duration, size in pixels and stack are still sent, even to a device that never had it. The web app shows none of it.

Automatic detection

Your administrator can turn on Detect NSFW images, which checks photos on your server with a classifier. A detection only locks a photo while Hide detected NSFW assets is also turned on. The classifier’s result is kept privately and separately from visible tags.

Administrators can review each result, run detection again, mark a photo safe or NSFW, or accept the classifier’s verdict.

The recommended order is to run detection first, review the results, and only then turn on hiding. Turning hiding on later locks the unreviewed detections at that moment.

Upgrading from an older library

If your library had a Locked folder before it moved to Frameleaf, nothing private becomes visible and nothing disappears:

1. Everything in the old Locked folder gets a lock with the reason Moved from old Locked folder, and goes back to its place in the timeline, hidden until you unlock.
2. Everything you’d marked sensitive gets a Marked lock.
3. Items flagged by detection are locked only if Hide detected NSFW assets was on. With it off they were never hidden, so they stay where they are.
4. Stacks that were partly locked are locked as a whole, and the covers that locked photos held are replaced.

Tip

Use Frameleaf over HTTPS. Clearing cached thumbnails when someone signs in or out relies on a browser feature that only works over HTTPS, so on plain HTTP a shared browser can keep showing the previous person’s thumbnails for a while.