How to Password Protect your Mac

There are several steps to password protect a Mac, we’ll cover the essentials so that if someone is to turn on your Mac, wake it from a screensaver, or wake from sleep, they will be required to enter a password in order to use the computer.

How to Set Password Protection for Mac Login Screen

This will require a password on login immediately after system boot before anyone can use the Mac:

1. Open “System Preferences” from the  Apple menu
2. Click on “Users & Groups” (or “Accounts”)
3. Click on “Login Options” in the left corner of the Accounts window
4. You may need to enter the administrator password to make changes here, in that case click on the lock icon in the lower left corner
5. Under Login Options, set “Automatic login” to “Off”
6. Optional security measure: set “Display login window as” to “Name and password” – this will require someone to enter a name and a password into a blank field, providing no hints for usernames
7. Click the lock icon again to prevent any further changes

Now anytime your Mac boots, a user login screen will appear before anyone can access the desktop or your files.

If you’re into tweaking things, this login screen can be customized rather easily with a unique background, message, and logo.

Now this password protects your Mac on boot, but let’s also password protect your Mac when waking from sleep and waking from a screensaver.

Note that some newer versions of MacOS default to using login protection, whereas older versions of Mac OS X may not.

Password Protect a Mac Screensaver & When Waking from Sleep

We’ve sort of covered this tip before when showing you how to lock a Mac screen using a keyboard shortcut, so you may already have this enabled:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Click on “Security”
3. Under the “General” tab, select the checkbox next to “Require password after sleep or screen saver begins”
4. Optional security measure: set this to require a password immediately, otherwise set the amount of time you are comfortable with
5. Exit System Preferences

Now anytime your Mac activates a screensaver or is put to sleep, you will need to enter a password to gain access to it again.

You can also use the keystroke Shift+Control+Eject to activate the password lock screen immediately in most versions of Mac OS X. In modern MacOS versions, the key combination is Control+Command+Q to lock the screen.

If you’ve somehow managed to forget your Macs password, you can learn how to reset it using a variety of measures.

If you want to go even further password protect files and folders with a disk image on Mac or you can use this method to create an encrypted folder on the Mac with Disk Utility too.