A private photo vault for iPhone.
Private photos and videos belong somewhere separate from your camera roll, locked by something only you know.
Why not just leave them in Photos?
Private photos get exposed by accident: a shared album, a screen shown to a friend, a backup restored onto a family iPad, someone who knows your passcode. A vault takes them out of that flow and puts them behind a separate unlock.
How Cipher protects private photos and videos
- Encrypted on the device. Files are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, along with their names and previews.
- Its own unlock. A pattern or passphrase for each vault, separate from your iPhone passcode.
- Optional Face ID for one vault, if you prefer it.
- No account and no vault upload. The app does not send your vault contents to a Cipher server.
- Viewing without leaving copies. Photos, PDFs and video open from inside the vault rather than being saved back to your camera roll.
Moving photos in
Pick photos or videos from your library, or add files from the Files app. Cipher copies them into the vault. Your originals stay in Photos until you delete them, and anything you delete there goes to Apple’s Recently Deleted for about 30 days. Remember to clear that album if you want the originals gone.
If you lose your phone
A locked, encrypted vault does not hand over readable photos on its own. To get your photos back on a new iPhone you need an encrypted backup file you saved earlier and the vault’s twelve-word phrase. Read about backups.
Limits worth knowing
Cipher cannot protect photos while your phone is unlocked in someone’s hands, files you export out of the vault, or a recovery phrase that has been seen. See the security page.