Want to know who’s trying to get into your iPhone’s photo gallery or Whatsapp when you hand your phone to them. There’s a handy shortcut for that. This can be useful if you work in an office or have snoopy siblings at home. The shortcut secretly snaps a photo after percent who is trying to open a particular app.
I found a similar iPhone shortcut on twitter a few days ago unfortunately I haven’t got it but I got the idea, so I created myself.
Watch the Tutorial Video
This is how the shortcut works
I have set it up for the WhatsApp app. And here is how it works.
When when you tap on the WhatsApp icon, the shortcut gets activated, then it proms for a password. If you type the password, the shortcut will allow you to access Whatsapp.
If the password entered is wrong, not only it will deny access to the Whatsapp app, it will also take a photo of the person from the front camera of the iPhone.
You can download my shortcut and make changes to it. Here is the link below.
Download my shortcut.
Create your own shortcut
So here is a quick tutorial to show you how you can create your own shortcut in case you want to use it with any other app.
First you have to create an automation, which gets triggered when an app is opened. Select the app, in my case, it’s Photos app.
At this point that trigger has been selected which is, app open. Now you have to select the actions, select a blank shortcut.
In this shortcut you can add actions. First action would be, ‘Go to Home Screen’. This is because, it will prevent from viewing the contents inside Photos app.
Next action would be, ‘Asked for input’, in this action you can select number, as an input option. This is actually pop up, where you have to type in a number, we will be using it as a password.
Next action would be ‘If’ condition. Adding this action, you can set conditions, such as, if the input from previous section has the same value. In the value you can type your password, I would recommend four digit password.
Add another action, ‘Open app’, and select the app, in my case, it’s ‘Photos App’.
Add another action, ‘Wait’, and you can add something like 60 seconds or 120 seconds, depending on what your normal usage is, once you are inside the app.
This is because it will prevent running this app on loop. If you don’t add the ‘Wait’ action, the shortcut will trigger once the app opens, and it will continue to go in loop.
In the ‘Otherwise’ part of the action, select another action, ‘Take photo’, from front camera. Disable Preview for this action.
The next section would be ‘Save Photo, you can select the album. If you want to make it organised, you can go to the Photos app, create a new folder and under the folder create a new album, rename it, something descriptive, I have renamed it ‘Intruder Selfie’.
Come back to your shortcuts and select the album with the photo would be saved.
So, with this conditional action, if the password is entered correctly, it will open the app for you. If not, it will take photo from the front camera. Additionally, you can also add another action ‘Lock screen’ which will lock your phone after taking the photo.