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Enabling the Lock Locking What the Lock Does Not Do

Library Privacy Lock

The privacy lock hides a library behind authentication: a locked library is not displayed until you authenticate with Touch ID, Face ID, or your password. It works much like the Hidden album in Photos - the content is out of sight by default, without any extra password to remember. The privacy lock is a Vidarium PRO feature. Unlocking an already-locked library always works, whether or not PRO is active on the device.

Enabling the Lock

Open the library, choose Library Settings… from the sidebar menu and turn on Require Authentication. You will be asked to authenticate once - this confirms that the device can actually unlock the library later, so you can never lock yourself out. Any library can be locked: the Local library, the iCloud Library, and libraries stored in folders. Vidarium uses the authentication built into your device - Face ID or Touch ID where available, and your device passcode or your user account's login password otherwise. There is no separate library password, which also means there is nothing to forget or recover.

Locking

A lock-enabled library locks itself:

  • every time the app launches,
  • after the period of inactivity chosen under Auto-Lock (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes - or never),
  • immediately, when you choose Lock Library from the sidebar menu or in Library Settings.

Watching a video counts as activity, so playback is never interrupted by the auto-lock. Time the app spends in the background counts towards the auto-lock period. When the library locks, every window showing it returns to the lock screen and playback stops.

What the Lock Does Not Do

The privacy lock hides the library in Vidarium - it does not encrypt anything. The video files remain on disk exactly as before and stay accessible in the Finder, in the Files app, and to other applications. Search results indexed via Spotlight may also continue to appear. If you need actual protection against someone with access to your user account, use an encrypted disk image or a separate macOS user account instead. Because the lock is stored with the library itself, a locked folder library carries its lock to every device that opens it, and the iCloud Library's lock applies on all your devices.