Albums, viewer and secure export

A vault that holds a few files is easy to manage. A vault that holds hundreds needs structure. Velcrypt gives every vault albums, a fast way to move things around and a viewer that feels at home on iPhone.

Albums inside each vault

An album in Velcrypt is a named group of items inside a single vault. You might create “ID and paperwork”, “Health”, “Personal” and “Projects”, or simply one album per year. Albums can hold photos, videos and documents.

Albums belong to their vault. Because every pattern opens a separate hidden vault, each vault has its own albums, and nothing in one vault reveals the album names in another. A decoy vault can have perfectly ordinary albums while your real ones stay behind a different pattern.

If you are deciding between Velcrypt and the album options built into iOS, the guide on making a secret photo album on iPhone compares them.

Multi-select and moving items

Multi-select lets you tap several items and act on all of them at once, instead of one by one. Use it to:

1. Select the photos, videos or documents you want.
2. Move them to another album in the same vault.
3. Export them together when you need copies outside the vault.
4. Delete them from the vault when they are no longer needed.

Moving items between albums only changes how they are organised. They stay encrypted in the same vault throughout.

The viewer: zoom and swipe

Velcrypt's viewer opens photos, videos and documents inside the vault. Pinch to zoom into a detail, such as the small print on a scanned ID, and swipe left or right to move through the album. Videos play in place, as described on the hide videos page.

Items are decrypted for viewing only while the vault is open. When you leave the app, auto-lock closes the vault and the app switcher preview stays blank.

Secure export, and why to treat it carefully

Export is how an item leaves the vault on purpose, for example to send a document to an office, post a photo, or move something back to your library. Export is deliberate: nothing leaves the vault unless you explicitly choose it, item by item or with multi-select.

What export does is simple and worth being clear about: it creates a decrypted copy outside the vault. From that moment there are two versions:

Copy	Protected by Velcrypt?
The item in your vault	Yes, encrypted with AES-256-GCM
The exported copy	No, it behaves like any normal file or photo

A few habits keep export safe:

• Export only when you need to, and only the items you need.
• Delete the exported copy afterwards. If it went to Photos, remember Recently Deleted keeps it for about 30 days unless you empty it. The guide on deleting originals after import covers the steps.
• Check metadata before sharing. Photos can carry location and device details. Use remove photo metadata on iPhone before sending a picture to someone else.
• Remember the recipient. Once you send a copy, it lives on their device and in their backups. Velcrypt cannot reach it.

Organising tips

• Keep albums broad. A handful of clear albums is easier to keep tidy than dozens of tiny ones.
• Use albums for routine, vaults for separation. Albums are for organisation. If two sets of files should never be seen together, put them in different vaults with different patterns.
• Review now and then. Delete what you no longer need. The fewer sensitive files you keep, the less there is to protect.

For details on getting files in to begin with, see hide photos and private documents.