Give the Photos app the features it needs with PhotoManager

Compared to other operating systems, iOS’ Photos app has always left a lot to be desired. Fortunately, a new jailbreak tweak called PhotoManager by iOS developer Frozen Penguin can fill in the blanks with the features you’ve always wanted in your stock photo app.

Compared to some tweaks, which just add one extra bell or whistle here and there, PhotoManager introduces a plethora of genuinely useful features that you’ll actually use. For that reason, I found it very exciting to delve into what the tweak has to offer, and I think you’ll feel the same way once you see it for yourself.

Among the things PhotoManager brings to the stock Photos app are:

  • The ability to move or copy images from the Camera Roll to another album
  • Protect individual albums in the Photos app with Touch ID authentication
  • Hide protected albums from appearing in the photo picker in other apps
  • Save photos taken with the camera directly to specific albums on your device
  • Quickly hide or show protected albums with a quick gesture
  • Individually hide stock albums on your device (including Recently Deleted)
  • Configure a custom grid layout for the albums in your Photos app
  • Customize the tab bar to your heart’s content

Out of all the features outlined above, some of my favorites are locking certain albums, quickly moving images from the Camera Roll to other albums without just copying the image, and hiding individual albums on demand (especially from apps). Of course, everyone has a different idea of what features are useful so your opinion might vary from mine.

As shown in the screenshot examples above, you can see that there are three albums per row instead of two, as a stock device would have. Moreover, locked albums have a lock icon displayed on them to indicate that you must authenticate yourself somehow to view the images within.

After installation, PhotoManager puts a preference pane in the Settings app, shown below:

Here, the options are split into sections for organization purposes, but the primary option in the first preference pane is enabling or disabling the tweak on demand. As we move through the additional sections, you’ll find more options:

In these panes, you can do things like:

  • Configure a custom number of columns
  • Choose your own font size
  • Hide or show the album title
  • Hide or show the contained item count
  • Configure the appearance of locked albums
    • Blurred
    • Blank
    • Normal image
  • Hide or show stock album types:
    • Recently deleted
    • Hidden
    • Favorites
    • Places
    • People
    • Video
    • Selfies
    • Panoramas
    • Timelapse
    • Slo-mo
    • Bursts
    • Screenshots
  • Hide or show tabs at the bottom of the app:
    • Moments
    • Memories
    • Shared
    • Albums
  • Enable or disable moving photos between albums
  • Automatically move screenshots to the screenshots album
  • Automatically apply selfies to the selfies album, time lapse to the time lapse album, slo-mo to the slo-mo album, etc.
  • Choose how to authenticate for locked albums
    • Touch ID
    • Password
    • No authentication
  • Hide locked albums from showing in the photo picker from other apps
  • Enable or disable the album picker
  • Remember the last-picked album in the album picker
  • Skip the deletion confirmation message
  • Remove the search function from the Photos app
  • Configure your album settings
  • And more…

Given the slowness of the jailbreak community lately, I would have to say this is one of the most robust tweak releases within the last few months. If you’re looking for an effective way to add useful functionality to your iPhone, particularly in the Photos app, then I can’t recommend PhotoManager to you enough.

If you’re interested in giving PhotoManager a try, you can download it for $1.99 from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak is compatible with all jailbroken iOS 10 devices.

Are you interested in any of the features we covered in this post? Share in the comments section below!