If you’ve downloaded a lot of free music from iTunes – something you won’t be doing any more – or if you’ve downloaded free TV episodes, or if you’ve just gotten tired of some of the content you bought from the iTunes Store, you may want to hide it from your purchases. There are three good reasons to do this.
First, if you check your iTunes Purchased list, you’ll have less stuff to sort through when you’re looking for a song, album or movie. Second, if you have iTunes in the Cloud activated (in iTunes’ Store preferences), hiding items will ensure that you no longer see them in your iTunes library, even if you have deleted them. Third, these items won’t show up on your iOS devices if you have Show all Music or Show all Videos, or on your Apple TV if you have iTunes in the Cloud activated.
This is easy to do, and, while it may be time-consuming if you have a lot of content in your iTunes Purchased list, once you’ve hidden items, they’ll be out of sight, out of mind.
So, to do this, go to the iTunes Store. In the Quick Links sidebar at the right of the window on the main page of any store (Music, Movies, etc.), click Purchased. Or, click your name in the toolbar, and choose Purchased from the popup menu.
You’ll see options at the top-right of the window to choose a type of content, and, in the middle of the window, you can choose All, to view everything you’ve downloaded, or Not In My Library, to only see items that are not in your iTunes library.
In the above screenshot, I’m looking at purchased music. You can see a list of artists at the left, and I’ve selected Recent Purchases, which shows the only thing I’ve bought in the past couple of months. You can choose Songs, if you want to see songs in a list, or Albums, to see each album (or song, if you only have one from an album) with cover art.
To hide an item, hover your curser over the item – either a cover, as in the screenshot below, or a list item – and click the x icon.
You’ll have to do this one by one for each item you want to hide, and it can take a long time. But once you’ve done this, you won’t see these items any more.
So what if you want to see any of these again? You can do that too; hiding items is not permanent. To do this, click your name in the iTunes toolbar, then choose Account Info. Enter your password, if requested, then look at the iTunes in the Cloud section of the page that displays.
In the Hidden Purchases section, click Manage. You’ll see a page with all your hidden purchases.
Click the Unhide button under any of them to unhide them, or click Unhide All to make everything you’ve ever bought or downloaded for free visible anew in your Purchased list.