How to keep a copy of your passport on your iPhone, safely
A copy of your passport on your phone is one of the most useful things to have when travelling — and one of the worst things to leave lying around. Here is where it should live, and what it can and cannot do for you.
What a copy is good for
A copy will not get you through passport control or onto a plane. The original is the only thing that does. But a copy is worth having because it helps with everything around the journey:
- If the passport is lost or stolen. An embassy or consulate can issue an emergency travel document much faster when you can show them the number, the issue date and a picture of the photo page.
- Forms and bookings. Airlines, hotels and visa forms ask for the passport number, expiry date and exact spelling of your name. Copying them from your phone is quicker than digging the passport out of a bag.
- A police report. Reporting a theft goes more smoothly with the details to hand.
Keep a copy of the photo page, and of any visa or residence permit you are travelling on.
Where it should not live
Your camera roll
It is the obvious place and the worst one. A photo in the camera roll is shown to anyone you hand your phone to while scrolling through holiday pictures, it is visible to any app you have given access to your photos, and it syncs to wherever your photos sync. Your passport number, date of birth and face together are most of what someone needs to impersonate you.
If you do take it with the Camera, move it somewhere better and delete it from Photos — and then from Recently Deleted, where it stays for another 30 days.
Your email or a chat with yourself
Emailing a scan to yourself, or sending it to a “notes to self” chat, is common and convenient. It also puts your passport on someone else’s servers, in a mailbox that is one reused password away from somebody else.
Better places to keep it
The right place is somewhere that is locked on its own, not just because the phone is:
- A locked note. In the Notes app, scan the page (in a note, tap the attachment button, then Scan Documents), then lock the note (the More button, then Lock). It opens with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode. This is free and good enough for one or two documents.
- The Files app. Files can scan too (the More button, then Scan Documents), but a file there is not locked by itself — anyone who can open your phone can open it.
- A document organiser app. Worth it once you have more than a handful of documents, or want the details out of them, not just a picture.
Make the details easy to reach
Most of the time you do not need the picture, you need a number: the passport number for a booking, the expiry date for a visa form. Having those as text you can copy saves you from zooming into a photo and retyping it correctly on a small keyboard.
Document Organiser reads a passport when you add it — the number, name, nationality, date of birth and expiry date, from the machine-readable lines at the bottom of the photo page — and keeps each one as a detail you can copy in a tap. The number stays masked on screen until Face ID or your passcode reveals it, and once copied it clears itself from the clipboard within a minute.
If you lose your phone
A copy on a phone is only as safe as the phone. Three things make losing it much less of a problem:
- A passcode, and Face ID or Touch ID. Without one, anything on the phone is readable by whoever picks it up.
- Find My turned on, so you can lock or erase the phone remotely.
- A backup that is encrypted. So a new phone gets your documents back, and nobody else can read the backup. Document Organiser backs up to your own iCloud, encrypted on the device before it leaves, with a key that only your devices hold.
Quick checklist
- Photograph or scan the photo page, and any visa you are travelling on.
- Keep it somewhere locked, not in the camera roll or your email.
- Delete any stray copies from Photos and Recently Deleted.
- Know your passport’s expiry date, and set a reminder well before it — see how to get reminded before a passport expires.
- Carry the original. A copy never replaces it.