You may not use some iPhone features that often. But if you ever need them, it’s useful to know them. In this week’s iPhone tips we introduce you to 5!
5 tricks you need to know for when you need them
These iPhone tips show you how to adjust the flashlight brightness, how to hide personal photos, and how to silently call emergency services. These are all things that you probably don’t need often, but are still useful to know!
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1. Adjust the flashlight intensity
There are conceivable situations in which you need a flashlight, but cannot use extremely bright light. And sometimes you want the maximum brightness of the flashlight. Either way, number one of these iPhone tips is as simple as it is effective!
To adjust the brightness of the flashlight, open the Control Center (swipe down from the top right of the screen, open an iPhone with the home button, swipe from the bottom up) and then long-press the flashlight icon. A vertical bar appears on the screen with five settings. The bottom position is ‘off’, the four positions above it increase in intensity. Just swipe up or down to adjust the orientation.
2. Hide personal photos
Sometimes you have photos that are really only for your eyes. There are all kinds of ways to take care of that, but the easiest is to just hide them on your iPhone. In number two of these iPhone tips we show you how to do that.
The Photos app has a secret folder that can only be accessed with Face ID or a password. Long-press a photo or video you want to hide, then tap Hide. To view your hidden photos, go to ‘Albums’. Tap Hidden and the folder will be unlocked with Face ID (or Touch ID or a passcode, depending on your iPhone and settings).
3. Use Face ID for third-party apps
Just like you sometimes have photos that no one else needs to see, you also have apps that you would rather keep all to yourself. You can’t hide those apps, but you can protect some of those apps with Face ID. That’s how it goes.
- Open the Settings app;
- Tap ‘Face ID & Passcode’;
- Enter your access code;
- Tap ‘Other apps’;
- Enable the apps you want to protect.
Unfortunately, the function is currently limited to certain apps. The number of apps that support the function may be expanded in the future.
4. Silently call the emergency services
Hopefully you will never really need this function, but it is a nice idea that this is possible with your iPhone: silently calling the emergency services. There is a quick way to call the emergency services, but by default an alarm sounds first. In number four of these iPhone tips we’ll show you how to disable that.
Go to the Settings app and tap SOS emergency notification. The options ‘Ring with press and release’ and ‘Ring with five button presses’ are probably already enabled. But as you can see there, an alarm goes off with both options first. Therefore, enable the ‘Call Silent’ option to prevent this.
5. Use picture-in-picture
We conclude this week’s iPhone tips with a trick that is sometimes useful. Because if you don’t really need this feature, it’s just annoying. But every now and then it happens that you want to do two things at the same time. Think of typing an email and simultaneously following an important broadcast, for example. Then you use Picture-in-picture.
Apple does not have a real multitask function, but with Picture-in-Picture a floating window on top of another app is possible. You enable (and disable again) the option as follows:
- Open the Settings app;
- Tap ‘General’ and then ‘Picture in Picture’;
- Enable the option ‘Start Picture in Picture automatically’.
If you are watching a video or making a FaceTime call and go to another app, that video or call will remain visible thanks to the Picture-in-Picture feature.
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Did you like these iPhone tips and want more? On iPhoned you can read useful tips and tricks for your iPhone every week. Check out the most recent tips below!
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