Vaultumi

How to keep private photos safe on your iPhone

By Vaultumi. Published .

Most leaks of private photos are not clever attacks. They are stray copies, a guessable passcode or a backup nobody remembered. These habits cover the common cases.

Start with the phone itself

  • Use a strong passcode. A passcode longer than six digits is harder to guess, and every other protection on the phone leans on it.
  • Keep iOS up to date. Updates fix security problems that lock screens and apps cannot work around.
  • Turn on Find My so you can locate, lock or erase the phone if you lose it. The lost iPhone guide walks through it.
  • Be careful who knows the passcode. Anything that is protected only by your device passcode is open to everyone who knows it.

Find the stray copies

A private photo is rarely in one place. Check where else it might be:

  • the main Photos library, and Recently Deleted, where deleted photos stay for about 30 days;
  • iCloud Photos and other devices signed in to your account;
  • shared albums, and messages or chats where you sent the picture;
  • screenshots, which iOS saves to your Photos library and which no app can prevent;
  • files you exported, which are ordinary unprotected copies.

Deleting the original after you move a photo somewhere safer only works if you also clear these. It is tedious once, and then it becomes habit.

Give apps less access

When an app asks for your photo library, iOS lets you share only selected photos instead of everything. For most apps that is plenty. Review Settings > Privacy & Security > Photos now and then and remove access from apps you no longer use.

Some apps upload photos to their own servers to back them up or edit them. Before you give an app full access to your library, read what it says it does with your pictures, and ask whether it needs the library at all. A vault that works without an account and without a network connection of its own avoids that question for the photos you put in it.

Separate private from personal

Not every photo needs the same protection. Family pictures can live in the normal library. The few that would hurt if they were seen deserve their own lock, away from the library, backups of the library and anything that syncs.

That is what a vault app is for. Vaultumi stores each photo or video encrypted on your iPhone, with no account and no cloud of its own, and it asks for a PIN or Face ID every time you come back to it. If you are choosing between that and the built-in option, read hidden album vs a vault app.

Look after the secrets, not only the photos

A lock is only as good as what opens it. With a vault, the secrets are a PIN, a recovery code and a backup passphrase.

  • Pick a PIN that is not a birthday, a repeated digit or a simple run. Vaultumi rejects obvious ones.
  • Write the recovery code on paper and store it away from the phone. Do not keep it in a note on the same iPhone.
  • Choose a long, unique backup passphrase. A short one can be cracked by anyone who gets the file.

If you lose every secret and every backup, the data cannot be recovered. That is by design: there is no back door, for you or for anyone else.

Think before you share or export

Sending a photo gives the other person a full copy that you cannot take back, and they decide where it is stored. Photos also carry details such as when and where they were taken; the iOS share sheet has an Options button that lets you leave some of that out, so look at it before you send.

Vaultumi exports an item as an ordinary unprotected copy to the place you choose, and it does not strip those details from the file. That is why exporting is a deliberate step, and why you should delete the exported copy once it has done its job.

Back up on purpose

A private photo that exists once is one accident away from being gone. Make an encrypted backup of the vault, keep the file and its passphrase in different places, and test that the backup opens. The full routine is in how to back up a private photo vault.

What a vault cannot do

Be wary of any product that promises total security. Vaultumi protects files at rest on your iPhone. It cannot protect against a compromised or jailbroken device, malware, someone watching your screen or PIN, coercion, forensic analysis of the phone’s storage or a weak backup passphrase. It has not been audited. The security page lists every limit we know of, because you should decide with the full picture.

A five-minute checklist

  1. Change a weak device passcode.
  2. Switch on Find My.
  3. Check Recently Deleted and shared albums for photos you thought were gone.
  4. Move the truly private photos into a locked vault, then delete the originals and clear Recently Deleted.
  5. Write down your recovery code and make one backup you have tested.

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