Is a Photo Vault App Safe? Most Don't Encrypt

What photo vault apps promise

Photo vault apps have a simple pitch: hide your private photos behind a password so no one else can see them. Download the app, set a PIN, import your sensitive photos, delete them from your main gallery, and you're protected.

The App Store and Play Store are packed with these apps. Private Photo Vault, Keepsafe, LockMyPix, Calculator+ (the vault disguised as a calculator), and dozens more. The table below covers the ones people ask about most.

The marketing language is reassuring. "Military-grade encryption." "Bank-level security." "Your photos are completely safe." People trust these claims because the apps work as advertised on the surface: open the app, enter your PIN, see your photos. Close the app, photos disappear from view.

A PIN screen and an encrypted file are different things, and the studies below show how often an app delivers only the first.

What actually happens to your photos

Vault apps have been tested by hand, twice, in peer-reviewed work. In 2017 a team analyzed 18 Android vault apps, together accounting for nearly 220 million downloads, and found that 6 of them did not encrypt the photos they stored, 8 did not encrypt videos, and 7 kept the vault password in plain text (Zhang, Baggili and Breitinger, Computers & Security). In 2022 a second team tested 20 vault apps and pulled files off the phone without rooting it in 15 of the 20 cases; only 5 of the 20 encrypted the files at all (Ruffin and others, ACM WPES).

Here's what that means in practice:

• Connect your phone to a computer and the "hidden" photos are visible in the app's data folder as standard JPEG or PNG files
• Extract a device backup (iCloud, iTunes, or Android backup) and every "vault" photo sits in plaintext within the backup archive
• EXIF metadata is fully intact - GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps, and even editing history are all readable
• File recovery tools can find the original images even after you've "deleted" them from your main gallery

A PIN stops a casual glance at your phone. In the apps the 2017 and 2022 studies tested, it often did not stop a laptop and a cable.

A correction, with its date on it. Three things on this page did not hold up, and correcting them changed the table more than the prose. The page said Private Photo Vault had its Firebase database exposed, with plaintext passwords. The report behind that sentence, a Cybernews story of 9 April 2025, describes a different app, also called Photo Vault, from a different developer, and we could not find a source that names Private Photo Vault in an exposure of that kind. The table then reached a verdict on each app that our own reading did not support: it marked Keepsafe, Private Photo Vault, SPV and Calculator+ as storing photos unencrypted, put the wrong prices beside LockMyPix and Inner Gallery, and leaned on a "6 out of 7 apps" audit that turns out to be a rival vendor's own test rather than a published one. It now separates what each app claims from what has been tested by name, with the store prices beside it.

What each vault app claims, and what has been tested

The table separates what an app says about encryption from what anyone has checked. "Not tested" means exactly that, not that the app fails: no published test of it exists that we could find, in either direction.

LockMyPix documents AES CTR encryption for every imported photo, video and document, and its listing says more than 40 million people use it. A 2022 paper by Lee, Kim and Park in the Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology found the file names and extensions encrypted with AES-128-CBC and the PIN and password with AES-128-CTR, with the key derived from a SHA-1 hash, which is a weaker setup than the documentation describes. An ePrivacy seal covering versions of the app from December 2022 confirms that its encryption was reviewed by a third party; that certificate expired on 18 December 2025. Prices on the App Store start at $7.99, with a lifetime purchase at $189.99.

Inner Gallery encrypts each file with ChaCha20-Poly1305 and syncs to iCloud end to end, according to its own listing and site. We found no independent test of it, in either direction. It sells a one-time upgrade rather than a subscription: from $9.99, with a lifetime option at $99.99 and cloud sync as a $14.99 add-on.

Keepsafe is the most popular app in this list and the most careful about what it promises. Its help center says files are encrypted at rest with 256-bit AES, and the same page says Keepsafe is not a zero-knowledge app, so the company can view personal data in limited cases. Photos back up to its own cloud, encrypted. A 2017 study recorded Keepsafe storing its media encrypted and worked out how to decrypt it with the key. On tracking, the number usually quoted comes from Keepsafe's analytics vendor: an Amplitude case study from 2016 says the company was tracking six billion events within a year of adopting the tool.

Private Photo Vault is the row where the answer is hardest to pin down. The developer's security page, dated 22 September 2026, says files stored in the app use AES encryption and that the optional Cloud Vault backup is encrypted on the device before upload, with Argon2id for the backup password. The same page says it is product documentation rather than an independent audit, and we could not find an audit of the current version. The independent work we did find looks at older versions. A 2017 forensic study of the Android app (Zhang, Baggili and Breitinger, Computers & Security) found the files encrypted and the four-digit PIN stored as a SHA1 hash, which is quick to brute force. A 2014 review of the iOS app found the files stored with no encryption beyond whatever iOS itself applies.

The built-in options you're probably ignoring

Both iOS and Android now have built-in photo hiding features that are free and that encrypt the photos with the device's own disk encryption rather than with something the app has to be trusted to do.

iPhone: Hidden album with Face ID

Since iOS 16, the Hidden album in Photos is locked behind Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode by default. Photos moved to the Hidden album are excluded from widgets, Memories, and the main library. Combined with iPhone's full-disk encryption, hidden photos are encrypted at rest when your phone is locked.

To use it: open a photo, tap the share button, scroll down, and tap "Hide." The photo moves to the Hidden album under Utilities. For a complete walkthrough, see our guide to hiding photos on iPhone.

Android: Locked Folder in Google Photos

Google Photos' Locked Folder stores photos on-device only (not backed up to the cloud) and requires your device lock to access. Photos in the Locked Folder can't be screenshotted, shared, or included in Google's AI features. Samsung's Secure Folder goes further, creating a separate encrypted environment on the device.

For more details, check our guide to hiding photos on Android.

The catch with both built-in options: they're designed for hiding photos on your device. They don't help when you need to share those photos with someone else privately.

A different approach: share privately instead of hiding

Vault apps solve one problem: preventing someone with physical access to your phone from seeing certain photos. But most people don't just want to hide photos - they want to share them with specific people without everyone else seeing them.

That's a different problem, and it needs a different solution.

Viallo is a private photo sharing platform that lets you create photo albums and share them through a link. Every shared album stays private behind an unguessable link you can revoke or expire anytime. Recipients view the full gallery - with lightbox, automatic location grouping, and interactive map view - without creating an account or downloading an app. Photos are stored in full resolution and reach a viewer only through the link you sent; the site measures visits with Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel.

The difference from a vault app is fundamental. A vault app hides photos on your device. A private sharing platform protects photos while making them accessible to the people you choose. If your goal is sharing family photos, travel albums, or event photos with specific people, a vault app is the wrong tool.

For a broader comparison of private sharing options, see our guide to how to share photos privately or our breakdown of the best private photo sharing apps in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions