Stop iPhone Memories from showing photos of your ex
Your iPhone doesn’t know the relationship ended. You can tell it.
In short
Open a photo of the person in Photos, tap the More button, choose Don’t Feature a Person, then Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person. To stop memories and featured photos altogether, turn off Show Featured Content in your account menu in Photos. Hiding or deleting the photos is a separate choice that can wait.
Key takeaways
- “Never Feature This Person” covers Memories, featured photos and the widget.
- Show Featured Content turns automatic memories off entirely.
- Leaving a shared library lets you copy its content first.
Feature a person less, or never
- Open a photo of the person in Photos.
- Tap the More button, then tap Don’t Feature a Person. If there is more than one person in the photo, tap the right one, then tap Next.
- Choose Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person, then tap Confirm.
This changes what Photos suggests in memories, featured photos and the Photos widget. The photos themselves stay in your library. To undo it later, tap Collections, tap your account in the top-right corner, then tap Reset People & Pets Suggestions.
From Collections › People & Pets, you can also touch and hold the person’s key photo and choose Hide [name] or Don’t Feature [name].
Deal with one memory
In Collections, open Memories, touch and hold a memory and choose Feature Less — this day, this place or a person — or Delete Memory.
Turn off memories altogether
In Photos, tap Collections, tap your account in the top-right corner and turn off Show Featured Content. Photos stops automatically generating featured photos and memories. Turning off Show Holiday Events also stops memories built around holidays.
Shared libraries
If you and your ex shared an iCloud Shared Photo Library, its content appears in every participant’s memories and featured photos. When you leave, Photos lets you copy everything from it into your own library, or only what you contributed. If the organizer deletes it, participants who have been members for more than seven days can copy everything — so the other person may keep copies too.
The photos themselves
There is no need to decide today. Moving photos out of sight is often easier than choosing what to delete. Hiding sends them to the Hidden collection, which opens with your passcode. A vault like Latent keeps them encrypted behind a pattern of their own, out of Memories, the widget and the Photos search, until you know what you want to keep.