Are Photo Vault Apps Actually Safe? I Checked.
I looked into the privacy practices of Keepsafe, Private Photo Vault, and HiddenVault. Most of them can see your photos — and they tell you so in their privacy policies.
You download a photo vault because you want privacy. PIN, padlock icon, the whole deal. You feel safe.
Except most of these apps can see your photos. Some of them literally tell you so — buried in their privacy policies.
I spent way too long looking into this before building Inner Gallery. Here's what I found.
Keepsafe
The biggest name in the category. TrendApps estimates around 70k monthly downloads and $700k/month in iOS revenue (based on Sensor Tower data, January 2026).
Keepsafe's own product page describes itself as "cloud photo storage to lock and back up your private photos." That's a direct quote. Your photos go to their servers — it's the product, not a side-effect.
Their privacy policy states that personal information "may be collected, used and stored in the United States or in other locations outside of your home country."
On the analytics side, Amplitude — a third-party analytics platform — published a case study about Keepsafe on their blog, explaining how the "privacy app" uses behavioral analytics to optimize pricing. In a separate Amplitude article, they mention Keepsafe was "tracking 6 billion events and counting." That's the scale of behavioral data being collected inside an app people download to hide photos.
Then there's the data loss — something I found repeatedly on Reddit while researching:
- May 2025, r/ios — "lost all the data without approval or anything"
- March 2025, r/techsupport — factory reset, photos gone
- January 2025, r/datarecovery — same pattern
When your photos live on someone else's server, this is a risk you can't eliminate.
They charge $9.99/month for this. $120/year.
Private Photo Vault
Around since 2011. Sensor Tower estimates roughly 70k monthly downloads and $1M/month in iOS revenue.
JustUseApp — a review aggregator that runs NLP analysis on user reviews — gives it a safety score of 0 out of 100 based on over 981,000 reviews. To be clear: this isn't a formal security audit. It's an automated sentiment analysis of nearly a million user reviews. But a score of zero from that many reviews says something about the user experience.
The app charges about $40/year in subscriptions. The UI hasn't changed much since its early days, and neither has the underlying security architecture — which predates modern authenticated encryption standards.
HiddenVault
According to its App Store listing, HiddenVault charges $2.99/week with auto-renewal. That's $155/year.
Their own website lists "iCloud Backup + Restore" as a premium feature. So your "hidden" photos sit on Apple's servers — accessible via your iCloud account, included in backups, and subject to any data requests Apple complies with.
$155/year for iCloud storage with a PIN screen on top.
The real issue
A PIN on an app is not encryption. It's a UI gate. It stops someone from casually opening the app. That's it.
It does nothing against someone with filesystem access, a compromised backup, the developer themselves, or a legal request to their server provider.
Actual privacy requires:
- Encryption where the developer can't access your data
- Photos that never leave your device unless you choose to move them
- No server-side storage
- No behavioral analytics
Most vault apps fail every one of these.
What I built instead
Inner Gallery encrypts every photo on-device. Key derived from your PIN via PBKDF2, 100k iterations. Zero servers, zero analytics, zero tracking SDKs. The app doesn't even have network permissions.
That's what "private" actually means.
How to check your current vault app
If you're using a vault app right now, here's a quick sanity check:
- Does it work in airplane mode? If not, it's talking to a server.
- Read the privacy policy. Search for "cloud", "servers", "third party". You might be surprised.
- Does it explain how it encrypts? Vague claims like "military-grade encryption" with no specifics is a red flag.
- Check Exodus Privacy for tracker reports on the Android version — it lists every SDK an app bundles.
If your "private" vault fails these checks, your photos might not be private at all.
Inner Gallery encrypts every file locally. Zero analytics, zero servers. Try it free on the App Store.
Ready to take your photos private?
Inner Gallery is a private photo vault for iPhone. Encrypted, offline, no subscription.
Download on the App Store