What Is 'Shared with You' in Photos, and How Do You Turn It Off?

What "Shared with You" actually is

Shared with You is a system-level feature that watches what people send you in Messages and automatically pulls certain content into the matching app. According to Apple's own support documentation, content shared with you in Messages is automatically organized into a Shared with You section inside Music, TV, News, Photos, Podcasts, and Safari (Apple Support). For photos specifically, that means any picture or video someone sends you in a Messages conversation can surface in the Photos app's For You tab, under its own Shared with You row, alongside your own camera roll.

The feature is meant to save you from scrolling back through a chat thread to find a photo again. But because it runs automatically in the background, plenty of people discover it by accident, sometimes months after the fact, and wonder why photos from a group chat are living inside their main Photos library view.

A few things worth knowing about how it behaves:

• It only surfaces content sent to you through Messages, not photos you import, AirDrop, or receive by email.
• It groups images by conversation, so you can jump back to the original chat from the photo itself.
• It does not copy the photo into your camera roll or your device storage in a new location; it displays a reference to what was shared in the conversation.

How to turn off Shared with You for Photos

Apple gives you two levels of control: turn it off for everyone across a specific app, or turn it off for one conversation at a time.

Turn it off for Photos entirely (all conversations):

You can also turn off "Automatic Sharing" in that same screen to disable Shared with You across every connected app at once, not just Photos (Apple Support).

Turn it off for one person or group chat only:

This is useful if you are fine with Shared with You in general but don't want a specific chat (a work group, for example) feeding into your Photos app.

• Open Settings on your iPhone.
• Tap Apps, then tap Messages.
• Tap Shared with You.
• Turn off the toggle for Photos (you can leave the other apps, like Safari or Music, on if you only want to stop photos specifically).
• Open Messages and go to the conversation you want to exclude.
• Tap the contact name or group icon at the top of the thread.
• Tap Info.
• Turn off "Show in Shared with You."

Does this happen on the sender's side too?

Shared with You runs on the recipient's device based on what arrives in their Messages app. It is not something the person sending you a photo can prevent from their end; the setting lives entirely in your own Settings and Messages app, and it is controlled per device. If you use Messages on more than one device with the same Apple ID, you may need to check the setting on each one, since Shared with You preferences are not guaranteed to sync identically across every device.

Why this matters for privacy

Most people don't think of Photos as a place where Messages content ends up, so a photo you'd rather not have visible in your main photo library can land there without you doing anything. That is especially relevant if you hand your phone to someone else, since the For You tab is part of the regular Photos app and isn't hidden behind any extra step.

Apple's own Hidden album, found under Utilities in the Photos app, can hide individual photos and has required Face ID or your passcode to view since iOS 16, but it still relies on the same passcode as the rest of your phone, and Hidden album content syncs through iCloud Photos like the rest of your library (Apple Support). It is not a separate storage location with its own lock.

If you want photos kept fully out of the Photos app rather than just tucked into a folder inside it, that's a different kind of protection than what Shared with You or Apple's Hidden album offer. Secure Folder: Incogni Vault moves selected photos, videos, and files out of the Photos app entirely into a hidden gallery locked behind its own PIN or Face ID, separate from your phone's passcode, so content you move there won't show up in For You, Shared with You, Memories, or anywhere else inside Photos. It's a free download, and moving photos into the vault is a manual step you take yourself, not something that happens automatically the way Shared with You does.