How to Secure an Album in Xiaomi Gallery: The Complete Guide

Xiaomi smartphone owners often face the need to organize thousands of photos in a convenient order. The standard gallery offers many features, but one of the most useful for sorting is the ability to pin folders. This action allows you to take important or frequently viewed pictures to the very top of the list, ignoring the chronology of creation.

But many users confuse "fix" and "hide" -- in the MIUI ecosystem and the new HyperOS, these features are implemented differently. Fixing helps in navigation, whereas hiding requires a password and removes the album from public access -- and understanding this difference is key to managing media files effectively on your device.

In this article, we will take a closer look at the nuances of working with albums, learn how to use standard sorting tools, how to create favorite folders, and what alternatives exist for those who need maximum privacy. The instructions are relevant for most modern models, including the Redmi series and the Redmi series. POCO.

What is the difference between fixing and hiding albums?

Before you start setting up, you need to clearly define the purpose of your actions. The fix function in the standard sense of the Android interface is often absent as a separate “Anchor” button for ordinary folders. Instead, the system offers a “Favorites” mechanism or manual sorting. Affixing implies that the album will always be visible when you enter the gallery, regardless of the date you add new photos.

On the other hand, Hidden Album is a privacy feature, where the photos in this folder don't show up in the shared feed, but you need to enter a password, a fingerprint, or a face scan, a completely different level of interaction with the file system, designed to protect personal data from prying eyes.

⚠️ Warning: Don't confuse simple folder sorting with security. If your goal is to hide incriminating photos from children or colleagues, simply moving to the top of the list is not enough.

Xiaomi's shell interface is constantly changing, and older versions of MIUI could manually change folder order with a long press, but in current HyperOS builds, the logic has shifted to automation and artificial intelligence. Now the system itself offers "smart" albums that group photos by people, places and events.

Standard Sorting and Management Methods in MIUI

Xiaomi's standard Gallery app doesn't have a direct "Preserve Album" button in the context menu, as is the case with instant messengers, but the developers have provided several workarounds to achieve the same result, using the Album tab and manually selecting the display mode.

To start, open the app and go to the Album tab at the bottom of the screen, which shows all the folders you've created, as well as system categories. By clicking on the three dots in the top right corner, you can select sorting. Unfortunately, there's no "Access date" option here, but you can sort by name or update date.

To keep an important album at hand, many users rename folders by adding characters or numbers to the title's beginning, such as an album called "!Important" or «1_Work" will always be at the top of the list when sorted alphabetically, it is a simple but effective life hack that does not require installing third-party software.

• 📁 Rename the folder by adding a prefix of numbers or characters to lift to the top of the list.
• 📅 Use the sorting “by date of update” to folder with new photos rises upwards.
• 🔍 Create “Smart Albums” that automatically collect photos according to the specified criteria.
• 📂 Avoid creating too many nested folders to avoid getting confused in navigation.

It's also worth noting working with the Chosen Ones. MIUI There's a concept of adding a photo to a favorite, but it's about individual shots, not entire albums. However, if you make a smart album called Favorites, it's going to behave like a fastened folder with all the important content.

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Use the characters at the beginning of the folder name (e.g., "!!!Projects") to ensure they are shown first in the list when alphabetically sorted. This works on all versions of Android.

Using the Hidden Album feature for priority access

If by “fixing” you meant having to quickly but securely access certain photos, the Hidden Album feature in Xiaomi is perfect. Despite the name “hidden,” many use it as a personal archive, accessed through a special gesture or password, which is even faster than searching for a folder in a shared list.

To activate this feature, open the gallery, go to the Album tab and swipe down the screen until the lock icon appears. The system will prompt you to set up your password and check question. Once set up, you can move any photos there, and they will disappear from public access.

The thing about hidden albums is that they don't show up in the standard interface without doing a special action, which provides a high level of privacy, so you can create a separate hidden album for work documents or personal shots, and make sure that no one accidentally stumbles upon them when you flip through the tape.

It's important to understand that moving a photo to a hidden album physically copies or moves the file to a secure memory area. When you reset your phone settings without first displaying photos from a hidden album, you can permanently lose that data. Always back up important information.

Alternative: Second Space as a Super Album

For those who don't have enough of the hidden album functionality, Xiaomi offers a unique feature called Second Space, which is not just a folder, but a full-fledged copy of the operating system inside your phone, and you can switch between the main profile and the second one, just like between two different phones.

The second space is perfect for separating work and personal life. You can set a separate pin code or use a different unlock finger to instantly hit the environment with the apps and gallery you want. Photos taken in the second space are not physically visible in the first without switching.

The setup is done via the Settings menu → Second Space → Enable Second Space. The process takes a few minutes as the system creates a new user profile. This is the most reliable way to “fix” access to a particular dataset, separating it from the main use of the smartphone.

⚠️ Warning: Second space takes up extra memory on the device as some system files are duplicated. Make sure your Xiaomi smartphone has free space before activating.

Using the second space also allows you to customize different wallpapers, themes, and even Google or Mi Account accounts, which turns your smartphone into two devices in the same case. To switch, just attach the finger assigned to the second profile to the fingerprint scanner.

Working with smart albums and the Mi Cloud

Modern versions of the HyperOS and MIUI 14+ shells are all about artificial intelligence. The gallery automatically analyzes content and creates smart albums: "People," "Places," "Recent," "Screenshots," which can't be removed, but can be controlled.

Sync with Mi Cloud allows you to save albums in the cloud. If you lose your phone, your “fixed” and important photos will remain safe. To activate, go to Settings → Mi Account → Mi Cloud → Gallery and enable sync. This is especially useful for albums that you want to have always on hand on all Xiaomi devices.

Smart albums are dynamically updated, for example, if you create a Family album and add a photo to it, the system will automatically add new shots of these same people, which eliminates manual sorting every time you take a new picture.

• ☁️ Turn on sync so albums are accessible from tablet or PC.
• 🤖 Entrust AI face sorting to automatically collect photos of relatives.
• 🗑️ Clean up the “Recently Deleted” album regularly so you don’t take up space.
• 📱 Use i.mi.com to manage albums from your computer.

Cloud storage also frees up space on the device, and the Clean Memory feature removes local copies of photos that are already uploaded to the cloud, leaving them available for viewing in the gallery, which helps keep the smartphone running faster.

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Cloud sync is the only way to ensure that your “fixed” albums don’t go missing when your smartphone breaks or loses.

Frequent problems and ways to solve them

Users often experience a situation where the created album disappears or does not save, usually due to an error in indexing media files. If you created a folder, added a photo there, and after the reboot it disappeared, try clearing the cache of the Gallery application through the application settings.

Another common problem is the inability to rename a system album (like WhatsApp Images), which is created by third-party apps and blocked by the system from name changes, and to “fix” them, it is better to use the method of creating a shortcut or moving important files to the user folder.

If the gallery is slow or the albums don't open, check for updates for the Gallery app in the GetApps store or Google Play. Often interface bugs are fixed in security patches.