Peek-a-View2025.2 - App Store

Save your photos from accidental - or deliberate! - deletion by toddlers, clients, or anyone that can't be trusted.

Peek-a-View is a read-only photo gallery. Using Peek-a-View, you can always feel safe sharing your photos with anyone, because there is literally no way to have Peek-a-View delete your photos. In fact, Peek-a-View does not write ANY data back to your photo library.

When paired with the Guided Access feature on iOS and iPadOS, you can lock your device into Peek-a-View, ensuring that the only thing that device can do is look at photos, until you decide otherwise.

By default, Peek-a-View will show your most recent photos in your photo gallery, but it can be configured to only show a specific album. Furthermore, access to Peek-a-View's settings is automatically restricted when Guided Access is started.

Peek-a-View will show you your 20 most recent photos for free; a one-time in-app purchase will remove that limitation.

Peek-a-View fully supports Dark Mode, Dynamic Type, Live Photos, videos, and animated GIFs. With purchase, it also supports several alternative icons.

Born from a trip to an amusement park with a very independent toddler, Peek-a-View was written so that my wife and I can give our phones to our precocious two-year-old and know that she won't accidentally delete any of our precious memories.

Without Peek-a-View, we'd have to hope that she didn't figure out how to delete anything, or spend time fiddling with the Guided Access settings to block out the delete features on the Photos app.

With Peek-a-View, we can simply open the app, start Guided Access, and hand her the phone. No deletion, no modifications, no worries.

Privacy Policy: https://www.caseyliss.com/peek-a-view-privacy

Version History This version fixes some wonkiness around rotation, particularly around still images. 2025.2 05/06/2025 - Add new setting for tap-to-mute on videos. By default, this is on, and you can tap anywhere on the screen to mute/unmute a video. If you turn tap-to-mute off, you can still mute/unmute using the speaker icon.
- Fix live photos being super zoomed on the grid
- Fix link to Myke's website in the About screen 2025.1 04/26/2025 Add a new instructive video to show how to make a shortcut to automatically start Guided Access. You can access this from Settings or from the second page of onboarding, for new users, from the second page of onboarding. 2022.2 08/02/2022 Some freshening up, mostly in Settings. 2022.1 05/09/2022 Supports new features in iOS, including limiting Peek-a-View to only being able to read some photos from your photo library. 2020.11 09/16/2020 - Fixes a bug wherein the navigation bar would appear after a rotation even if Guided Access was enabled
- Adds some logging for a very unusual crash that a user reported. 2020.10 08/25/2020 Fixes some wonkiness with rotation during on-boarding. Existing users won't see any difference, but new users will now see that the two onboarding screens are now locked to portrait. 2020.9 08/05/2020 - No longer over-zooms when zoom is disabled. (That was a weird one.)
- Swipe to dismiss works on the entire screen and not just the media being displayed
- Once a video is muted/unmuted, all videos respect that choice until you close the app
- No longer shows the speaker icon if there is no audio content in a video
- Threading & memory improvements 2020.8 04/24/2020 NEW FEATURES
- You can now more granularly choose where motion previews are shown.
- Shared iCloud Photo libraries are selectable again
(Okay that's not a new feature but it's an important fix!)

FIXES
- The "Restore Purchase" screen is no longer SwiftUI and so it... actually looks correct.
- Fixed a crash when you leave the folder browser when a custom album is turned on
- Fixes a misalignment of a spinner [that you should never see] for those of you on larger phones
- General crash mitigations 2020.7 04/07/2020 MAJOR CHANGES:

-- Custom Albums!
You can now create a completely custom album on-the-fly that is used only within Peek‑a‑View. Select the items from your Recents album that you'd like to include to quickly and easily limit Peek‑a‑View to showing only those photos. As with everything else in Peek‑a‑View, that album is *not* written back to Photos and is only used within Peek‑a‑View.

-- Folder Support!
Now, Peek‑a‑View recognizes folders you've created in the Photos app, and allows you find albums by drilling down in the folders you've created

BUG FIXES:
There have been several bugs fixed:

- Small photos shouldn't be briefly shown while the full-size version is rendering
- Improved rotation behavior when a single photo is displayed
- No longer shows previews of Live Photos when Reduce Motion is enabled
- Improvements to VoiceOver support
- Fixed a rare crash in the Settings screen 2020.6 03/26/2020 - PANNING AND ZOOMING OF PHOTOS, by popular request! This includes double-tap to zoom
- New icon selector that shows icon titles
- New unpaid icon selector instead of an alert
- Slightly reworked look of album list
- More intelligent re-fetching of photo album list
- More intelligent re-fetching of photos due to changes
- No longer shows an error message when the user cancels a purchase/restore
- Grid no longer shows if you swipe past the first/last item in the single-item view
- Changed the album shortcut on the grid view from long tap to long press [on the album name]
- Changed instances of "Ok" to "OK"
- Fix alignment quirk on Guided Access onboarding screen
- Fix a typo in the purchase screen 2020.5 02/19/2020 That "pew pew pew" sound you heard with the last version was me shooting from the hip. In an effort to make some things better, I made some things worse. Whoops.

In this version:
- Should no longer see offset images when swiping between images
- "Ok" got changed to "OK", OK?
- Some other minor copy changes 2020.4 02/09/2020 Some quick bug fixes:

- Photos are now shown in full resolution! My apologies for missing that one.
- Less sensitive swipe to dismiss
- Will play video audio even when phone is silenced; additionally, other audio is ducked rather than stopped
- Live Photos and GIFs will no longer animate in the grid view when the system's Reduce Motion is enabled
- Additionally, there is now a setting to turn off those same previews if you simply prefer it
- Dramatically decrease the delay when opening the album selection screen
- Add link in Settings to get more help with Guided Access
- Onboarding screens locked to portrait
- Adds some bottom padding to the purchase screen 2020.3 02/08/2020 2020.1 02/06/2020