Private Photo Vault - Pic Safe Reviews

by RangerMac61

I’ve used PrivatePhotoVault for years. I used to love it and recommend it to friends. However, all that has changed!!! Somewhere in the various iOS 13 updates two bugs appeared. First, when typing in a new password for a new file, the number keyboard shifted back to the letter keyboard after the first number entry. Second, and far more serious, when a series of photos were entered into a file from the Apple Photos app, the original order of the photos was scramble!!!

I immediately reported these bugs to Photo Vault support, and was informed that they would be fixed when iOS 14 came out. Well, iOS 14 came out, and the bugs remained. Being a patient person, I waited until Apple’s next update, iOS 14.1 came out. Still the bugs remained!!! Yesterday, iOS 14.2 was released and guess what? The bugs remain!!!

The designers of PrivatePhotoVault either can’t or won’t fix the bugs reported above. Time for me to find another app to store photos!!! Save yourself the grief of having to move photos to a new storage app and don’t give this one further consideration!

by Musaabo

I use this all the same way everyone else does. Needless to say after an updated about a year ago, all the photos and videos I had disappeared. The photos and videos are still there but they don’t show and causes PrivatePhotoVault to crash. I reached out to support and they informed me that this was an issue <300 of a million people were experiencing and that an update was coming. After no luck I figured id upgrade to the premium app hoping I can restore the pics. After a year and several phones, the issue still persists. I figured I’d try the WiFi sync which I got to login but once I click the album, PrivatePhotoVault crashes on my phone and the page won’t load. I tried to export the photos and the same thing. Needless to say the developers have yet to address this issue and are blaming the way the phone is backed up, yet all my other apps seem to be working. If the photos are still there, it seems PrivatePhotoVault is failing to open them correctly. Hopefully they find a solution or a work around. Avoid the “first of all I’m sorry you’re experiencing this issue” response and resolve the issue or provide me on away to recover my stuff.

by D_back_17

PrivatePhotoVault will take up so much of your phone’s storage, it’s insane. I got PrivatePhotoVault with the intention to back up my pics and vids and perhaps clear up some space in a convenient manner. Ive come to realize, it wouldve been much easier if I had just transferred those files to a computer directly without using PrivatePhotoVault. Now my pics and vids are stuck on PrivatePhotoVault because transferring all of them back to my phone not only takes forever, but fails almost every time. PrivatePhotoVault’s ability to transfer your files to a computer, via wireless or wired, simply does not work. Try it yourself at your own risk. Now i have 2000+ pictures and videos trapped in PrivatePhotoVault that i cannot get out. I cant transfer them back to my phone without constant complication and PrivatePhotoVault’s ability to export files to a computer is an absolute joke. I also wasted money subscribing to their cloud vault, which is a joke too. I can’t delete any files without them deleting it on the cloud vault as well, so that was no use regarding making space in my phone either. Also their cloud vault has no url or website, so that basically means the cloud vault ALSO doesnt have any convenient means of exporting files.
DO NOT USE PrivatePhotoVault. They will literally hold your files hostage. They have convenient means of importing files but absolutely zero ability in exporting them. Just think on that.

by Assfffhj

I’ve been using PrivatePhotoVault for about a couple years and broke my phone recently I restore my iCloud but the apps didn’t come up so I re downloaded PrivatePhotoVault and every time I try to log into my account to get all my 5000 photos it keeps saying that it doesn’t exist this is very sad to me i emailed support and have not got a response at all I don’t know if this is a scam or what but I know I want my photos I have personal and last photos of my mother and other family members that have passed on this is unprofessional once again I’ve emailed private vault and their come back with a response on that is they just upgraded their system to where logging in is a possibility I upgraded my phone from the seven to the 12 it literally did not come like the rest of my cloud apps it logged me out and then told me to login in and when I put the email that I’ve used for many years it sent me an email and said that I’m not even in their system which is a lie do not put your photos or things that you would like to keep because if something happened PrivatePhotoVault has no concern about your well-being download GOOGLE PHOTOS best app you can possibly have

by Vin_D

First off I’ve used this product for years without any issues. Recently they released Ver 10.3 I believe and it was automatically downloaded and updated my app. I noticed there must have been an update after seeing a much improved editor when I edited a vid. I closed PrivatePhotoVault , reopened it 15 minutes later and all of my files were encrypted or at least I’m assuming that because over 3,000 pics & vids showed nothing but the grayscale wave in all the directories. That’s it, the only viewable file out of almost 3,000 was the one I edited. I’ve tried texting, emailing, copying, etc out of PrivatePhotoVault but nadda!
I have pics of everything critical in there. My last backup was over 3 months ago. That puts me out of almost a thousand pics & vids. I can’t get a Tech support reply, I’ve sent multiple request for help but nothing. I’m very frustrated that their success has given them a sense of complacency to my need for help.
I have almost 75gb of data (+-3000 files)that only shows up as a defective wave. I need those pics to access accounts created in the past few months. BE WARNED-Back up you iPhone on a frequent basis.
Help!!!!!!!

by Rafy Jr

PrivatePhotoVault is definitely great! I have used it since 2013. Here’s my thing though:

I downloaded it for the first time on my dad’s account. Later on i created one of my own, which was no problem. I’d just go into my dad’s account to download it and that’s it. Last time i changed phones, i had been with my old one for a long time. I downloaded PrivatePhotoVault from my account but it gave me no option to retrieve the pictures (that, by the way, i had not saved anywhere else) unless it had been downloaded from the same account. I thought it was safe and put it off because i had forgotten my dad’s password. I just re-downloaded PrivatePhotoVault , from my dad’s account this time, and i cannot find an option to retrieve those pictures. And I cannot find a “Contact us” option.

I’d appreciate if something could be done about this. I’m sure i’m not the only person this has happened to. If you, developers, could contact me, please do so.

by General Samus

Been using PrivatePhotoVault for a number of years and it’s totally worth spending the $$ versus using the free one. For only $7 you really can’t go wrong. One of the issues I have is when I imported my family vacation pics they are completely disorganized. I tried several different ways but every time they NEVER import in order and this is VERY annoying as I have to rearrange them by manually. I like to organize the folders in groups as it makes it WAY easier to access, but I’d like to have an option to have folders within a folder. For example: my trip to Houston I have some pictures and video that I’d like to separate them so I’m not searching all over for them. Even within picture folder, it’d be nice to separate my time at the Houston space center with my time in the golf. It just lumps them all together. The last thing is I wish there an option for either a list view or an icon view...and it could reorganized by title or date. When your library gets large, it’s VERY difficult to find the folder you’re looking for because they are listed in the order they were created and NOT alphabetically or numerically. Other than that—great app.

by Major_Ursa

The update to 10.x seems to have corrupted all my photos on my iPad. I had a lot of photos on there but now they just show white squares that won’t open and I can’t export. I’ve been using PrivatePhotoVault for 3+ years without issue before this update and it’s been great but now I’m really concerned about sticking with it.
However - on my iPhone, the update to 10.x hasn’t messed anything up (yet, fingers crossed). Maybe it’s because I haven’t opened it as much or at all between minor updates in the versions 10+ and onward or maybe it’s because I only have 3 albums and a much smaller number of photos. Also it could be that all my iPhone pictures were imported through app extensions while on my iPad I used the web import feature a ton. I honestly have no clue why one device works and the other doesn’t.
For reference: my devices are an iPhone XR and iPad Pro 10.5” both running the latest version of iOS and PrivatePhotoVault (10.3). Hopefully this info can help the developer nail down these issues

by Nickname1122339

I've been using the pro version of PrivatePhotoVault for about 4 years. Currently it's pretty well developed. The only issue I've ever had was losing 400+ pictures/videos due to PrivatePhotoVault not backing up to iCloud (2 years ago). I lost my phone while on a trip in Europe, after returning I tried a backup only to find that all data within PrivatePhotoVault was lost (literally as if I had never used PrivatePhotoVault before). I tried a fresh backup several times, each with the same results. Going into detail: I used photo vault for 2 years prior to the loss of the phone. I had pictures in my stock photo album that were dated same as some photos in the photo vault. The backup recovered 700+ pictures that were in my photo album (and other apps/app data) ... some dating up to just a couple weeks before I lost the phone. Basically I guess photo vault was never backed up, while just about everything else was? You'd think after paying for the pricey Pro Version and 2 years of constant use, there would be some element of assurance... I have had little use for PrivatePhotoVault since losing everything.

by Brytalozy

I have been a regular user of photo vault. I started with the regular version and then paid to get upgraded to the pro version. Everything seemed fine even until I lost my iPhone in summer 2019 during my research trip and had to restore/recover lost data. Lol and behold, not even a single one of the over 3,000 archival/research document pics that I got and moved to the vault were restored; I mean, not even a single one. I tried restoring from my itunes and iCloud yet no way. Never trust PrivatePhotoVault to recover your lost photo files. To make matters worse, I wrote several emails to the developers and even went to their company website to lodge a request to Legendary Software Labs LLC and not even a single response. At least, if you cannot solve the situation, calm your clients and respond to a single request. I cannot believe that after paying the monthly fee, I cannot even recover any thing. I felt frustrated because I so much believed in PrivatePhotoVault and even got my friends to get it. Now, I am lost and disappointed to say the least. Thanks but no thanks.

by Natasha-k

Just like another user who seems to have just reported the same problem on March 17, I've used PrivatePhotoVault for years without any issues. Then one day I logged in and PrivatePhotoVault acted like I had just downloaded it, and all my photos were gone -- same exact story as "Thedoomsong" user described. I also never deleted and reinstalled, no issues with my Apple account. iOS still thinks that PrivatePhotoVault has my photos based on the total amount of storage used by Photo Vault, but PrivatePhotoVault doesn't see them. I've reached out to customer service twice to see if I could salvage the photos and got no response. To say that I am frustrated is an understatement.
UPDATE: I never heard back from customer service, but PrivatePhotoVault did get fixed. I saw a note about a bug fix in the latest release and, thankfully, my photos are back. The folder names are gone, but that's nothing in comparison. Thank you, app developers!! I really appreciate that you got it fixed!

by DespicableBeast

Everything about PrivatePhotoVault ’s functionality and features are great! However, there are two big issues I have. 1.) I subscribed to the premium version to have to utilize the cloud storage. The description of the iCloud storage option is inaccurate. It states that you can can save space on your your device by synchronizing and uploading all the photos to the cloud so that when you preview the content on your device, it will download it from the cloud without using up the storage on your device. Which in sense, should be similar to IOS. However, when I preview the photos in PrivatePhotoVault . It downloads the photo to my device and does not remove it after previewing. Ultimately it does not save any space at all. If I wanted to remove the data from my device, I would have to wipe everything off by reinstalling PrivatePhotoVault . After doing that, I log in, and it will synchronize with the cloud until I open up the photo which then automatically downloads the photo to the device. 2.) I’m not sure if it was because of the update but when I reinstalled PrivatePhotoVault , I have a problem where I couldn’t connect to the server when I was logging back into my account. I had to remove my 1 year subscription and resubscribe to finally log back in. But doing so prompted a message saying that I would have to pay again after my 1 week free trial. My subscription didn’t expire until August 2022. Which means I did not use the whole year of the subscription.

by PhilippeBoudreaux

This is the very app I use to store extra photos. I’ve used it for 9 years now. However, it needs improvements.

- When I add multiple photos into any folder, it places them completely out of order. This makes it annoying to move them around into the right order.
- When I select multiple photos in the recent folder, it gives a white screen with an error message saying “can’t connect to iCloud, try again later.” The only way I know to avoid this is to slowly select photos and not select over a certain amount at once. I feel I shouldn’t have to do this workaround.
- About 2 years ago, my old iPad was wiped due to its battery dying during an iOS update. I was able to recover everything else using my iCloud backup, but when I went back to PrivatePhotoVault , everything was gone. I had probably a couple of thousand images, *poof* gone. There needs to be a good backup option so this does not happen in case of device loss.

by Hi Surfer

I just purchased this because the one I was using will not work with iOS11 beta. Photo Vault does everything pretty well including getting my photos imported easily from the camera roll on my phone as well as importing photos from my Mac using iTunes which is the way I always imported large numbers of photos from the Mac. The Touch ID is also greatly appreciated. As a major improvement I would like to see the library separated into a "local" and "iCloud" libraries so the cloud version is automatically and always synced with your iPad. Overall I'm very pleased with Photo Vault.

Since I wrote this, I’m finding that my new iPhone XS on iOS12 refuses to work when using iTunes sync. It downloads the photos into the iPhone as if it’s working properly(and taking up space)but the photos don’t show up within PrivatePhotoVault . Right now the only way I can transfer photos and videos from my iMac is via WiFi sync.

by Lett2icia Freitas

PrivatePhotoVault is great. It’s extremely safe because you need a password to open PrivatePhotoVault and another password to open the hidden albums (if you want to be 100% safe, you don’t necessarily have to). The only thing I think is missing is that I wish PrivatePhotoVault would save my pictures on my “profile”. Since it’s deleted from my phone and hidden inside PrivatePhotoVault , you would think that the pictures are saved on some type of cloud or inside PrivatePhotoVault itself but it isn’t. I switched phones and lost many pictures and videos because I didn’t think of downloading them onto my computer before switching phones. I also hoped that since I use an email and password it would save them somehow but it’s not the case. Regardless I still have PrivatePhotoVault on my new phone and at least now I’m aware of that so I can take care of it before I ever switch my phone again.

by Agamemnoch

Great free app for those photos and videos you want to keep private. Easy to use interface. Auto delete option for photos your switching from your camera roll to the photo vault. Pay a smallish fee if you want to add more than two folders or just do like I do and put everything in those one or two free folders
Since their doesn't seem to be a limit on how many photos or videos you can place in a single folder. Never used the I-Tunes folder option so I'm not sure how that works but the basic use of keeping those private photos and videos locked up and hidden is great. Also when activating your app usage by the home button double tap the last photo you accessed is sometimes temporarily displayed on the screen before it switches to the password enter screen. I believe they fixed this though.

by Appleman7934

One of my friends recommended PrivatePhotoVault to me years ago for securing my private photos and videos. I’ve now been using it since 2015, it continues to be supported with each new version of iOS and they provide good customer support when needed.

To break down the features that I like, the break-in report and decoy password are really cool. The break in report will take a photo whenever someone tries to get into PrivatePhotoVault . It is great for detecting snoopers. The decoy password gives you a whole separate account you can login to that opens to a different set of photos. This is perfect if someone wants to know what is in PrivatePhotoVault .

PrivatePhotoVault has the ability to create a pin for the overall app as well as passwords for each of the individual albums.

When you import photos from the photos app, it asks you if you’d like to delete them from the Photos app which is really convenient. Just make sure you also delete them from recently deleted too.

Looking at some of the reviews, it looks like people are forgetting their passwords. PrivatePhotoVault gives you the ability to set a backup email address, so if you set that setup you are fine.

Each update brings new features. I’m glad to have picked this one. It is fast, secure, reliable and feature rich. I highly recommend PrivatePhotoVault if you want a well supported app for securing your photos. I’m excited to see what they add next.

by Koenig1

I’ve been using PrivatePhotoVault for a long time and have loved its ease of use. There’s only a couple of things missing in my opinion.
1. Permanent folder thumbnail. Yes the last photo in the album is the photo you’ll see in the album thumbnail but it changes every time you add more pictures. If only one picture of your choosing could stay as the thumbnail permanently, that would be great.
2. Picture preview by press and hold when selecting multiple pictures. There are times when you want to select multiple pictures but you can’t tell what or who is in the picture because it’s so small. If you could just press and hold a picture for a second to blow it up that would be extremely helpful.
3. App icon. Keeping your pictures safe is great but an icon with a lock on it called photo vault draws attention to an unwanted person on your phone. If there were multiple inconspicuous app icons to choose from would help immensely.

by Prince Derek

Please help! ☹️ I haven’t update PrivatePhotoVault and says it needs to be updated to work with iOS 14 to use PrivatePhotoVault but then l found out about the update. So I stopped right there and saw you have removed the iTunes album, that it doesn’t exist as an album anymore. This is really terrible! I have over 500 photos in there! How am l going to move those photos to an album I worked so hard on my photos! And also, did you change the keyboard to enter the passcode? Why?? My passcode onIy contains lowercase letters. I didn’t enable passcode recovery. How am I going to type in letters with that numeric keyboard that only types in numbers? If I update to this version, PrivatePhotoVault ’s keyboard will change and photos I had in the iTunes album will be all gone! This is terrible! l’ve been using PrivatePhotoVault for 3 years now, I installed PrivatePhotoVault 3 years ago(August 1, 2018) and I worked so hard on my photos, my photos are very important, how are they gonna come out that perfect again. I’ll never access my photos again because l can't enter the correct passcode with letters. 😭
I need this fixed. 🙁

by Nickname-pi

The developer emphasizes in PrivatePhotoVault description that Private Photo Vault employees can’t view user’s photos and videos on the Cloud Vault Backup, but would that privacy also applies to photos and videos on users’ physical devices such as phone or ipad? The developer also mentions that user’s data such as user’s content (photos and videos) could also be collected, if I understand correctly of what it says on PrivatePhotoVault description. The two paragraphs above are conflicting to each other. Can you explain it please. It would be nice if PrivatePhotoVault allows user to change the private folder password. As of now, once I set my password for any particular folder, I can’t change the password of that folder. Other than that, I love everything else about PrivatePhotoVault . I have used it for several years now.

by Mondo Rondo

Since starting high school I’ve had a lot of use for PrivatePhotoVault. Starting in 9th grade I asked my friends what app I should use to store photos and they recommend this however, I wish they didn’t. I went along my high school journey quite smoothly using PrivatePhotoVault with minor or little problems but now I just finished my senior year and I am about to enter college and my photos are completely erased. It’s been like this for at least 8 months maybe a year. I had two albums inside PrivatePhotoVault . One for videos and one for pictures. All 600 pictures in the picture album have become corrupted because they all show a standard image. However with my videos I can say that around only 30 out of 130 videos are corrupted. I don’t know how this occurred and I’ve Tried everything to get them back but nothing has worked. Keep in mind when you add any photo or video to an album they give you the option to delete it from your camera roll. I did this and now the pictures and videos are lost forever I guess. So if you plan on using this long term I would suggest finding another app because you will be heartbroken once you see everything is corrupted. :(

by AHsu42388

I wish that when I re-add photos to my photo album that it would keep the original date the photos were taken. I use PrivatePhotoVault to store my work out progress photos and when I pull them out some keep the original date and some just bring it back like I just took it today. I don’t know why some save and some don’t. Regardless, I like PrivatePhotoVault the best out of all the rest because when I save to it, it asks me if I want to delete the one from my iOS photos app, which I 99% if the time do. It’s more convenient than having to switch back to PrivatePhotoVault and deleting the photo.

It does the job but the ads are super annoying so I ended up just spending the $3.99 to upgrade it to pro. I don’t really need to store videos or the other features it offers, I just really wanted the long ads to stop popping up after trying to view or download every few pics.

by Saver 106

Can you make it so that, if you want to select multiple photos at once, you can. Example: Lets say you have a music album, with around 1,000 photos in it. And you want to move 5 pictures from the bottom to the middle or top. The hard way of doing it is to select individual photos. The easier way would be to selecting multiple photos at once, or another option (that you guys can up with).

Also a way to move up and down the page faster while holding a picture.

An optional suggestion: when you select a photo, then you want to select the "start slideshow" at the bottom. Then a big screen comes up and you have to reach all the way to the top. To me a better way is that you can do a small menu that pops up. Similar to if you're on an iPad in safari you hold down the plus button and a small menu shows up.

by Wsidell

PrivatePhotoVault is pretty much the original app to password protect photos and videos on iPhone. I have had it since the beginning and the password protection is a really nice thing to have on your phone. I highly recommend PrivatePhotoVault to everyone. The animated gifs work really well, photos load quickly, and I no no longer have to worry about anyone looking at my private pics.

I also like how you can rearrange photos in PrivatePhotoVault within albums and the albums themselves.

Additionally, in the latest version, the UI has been beautified and works better than ever. The new wireless photo transfer is great now that it supports batch upload and download. Touch ID is nice as well.

Please, do yourself a favor, if you are looking for an app to hide photos, look no further. Private photo vault is the best. Highly recommended.

There was recently a bug that caused PrivatePhotoVault to crashed and it was fixed extremely quickly.

Update: live photo support is great. Highly recommend

Another great update, the team at Private Photo Vault always does a good job. I saw a review mentioning the privacy policy, and it protects the users privacy very well and does not share data with any 3rd parties. A+, keep up do the good work. Thanks for keeping up the updates!

by Dane Charles Crawford

You can set passwords for everything and finally have your privacy! You don't have to pay for anything and you get all these epic abillities! You have 3GB to make like thousands of albums and add millions of photos, and if you delete any of your photos by accsedent and you don't use recently deletes in Photos on Iphone and maybe IOS/Android. YOU DONT HAVE TO WORRY! You don't loose any of you photos in PrivatePhotoVault! It also gives you the choice to delete those photos from camera roll, while you add them to your album! That's some juicy proof. You make you albums by typing the password and the name then adding photos and finally your done. Basically 10 clicks to save all of your videos and photos. Anyone can afford this! Anyone can use it! And anyone can have personal privacy! All with a completely free app.

by Grizzleebare

The Ap Opens lightning fast unlike the calculator vault that takes forever to open if it does at all and usually takes multiple tries.
You do have to upgrade this Ap if you want the Ap to do what you downloaded it for, but that's just business.
So far I am very pleased so far. I also like that I can move pics in the folders and edit them there and it's all seamless and very easy, also not available on the previously mentioned Ap.
A nice upgrade/Fix would be to have the option to see the folders in a Grid/Window option along with the default vertical folder view and folder auto-alphabetic orginizing would be Stupid proofing what I already do myself. NO COMPLAINTS thus far, I highly recommend this Ap!