A secret photo album on your iPhone that opens only with your pattern

A surprise you are planning

You are photographing a gift, or screenshotting booking details, for a partner who borrows your phone every day. Apple's Hidden album is one tap away in the Photos app, so it is not much of a hiding place. You move the photos into a Weave Vault vault instead.

Each file is sealed with AES-256-GCM, with a fresh random 96-bit nonce and a 128-bit authentication tag per file. Your pattern is the only credential. It runs through Argon2id to a key-encryption key, which wraps a random 256-bit per-vault content key. The pattern itself is never written to disk, not to a file and not to the Keychain.

There is no account and no sign-up, so no profile exists that ties those photos to you. You can read more on pattern unlock, and on the Apple Hidden album comparison.

A phone someone else picks up

A colleague asks to see a photo. A child wants to play with your phone. You do not want a list of vaults on screen telling them there is more to find.

Weave Vault keeps no vault list, switcher, or count. A different pattern opens a different vault, and an unrecognised pattern opens a fresh empty vault rather than showing an error. Nothing on screen suggests another vault exists. The free tier gives you up to 3 vaults, so you can keep separate albums behind separate patterns. See multiple vaults and duress mode for what each feature does.

One hedge, stated as written: "We make no claim about what an examiner with the physical device could or could not determine." This page does not promise that a forensic examination would find nothing. It describes what the app shows to someone who picks up your unlocked phone and tries a pattern.

If you want photos to go straight into a vault, secure camera captures to the vault so the photo never lands in your camera roll first.

Backing up without handing over the keys

You get a new phone and do not want to lose the album. There is no Weave Vault vault-storage server. Encrypted backup copies the vault's ciphertext to your own iCloud or Google Drive. No vault key and no plaintext leaves the device.

Here is the split, exactly. Enabling backup requires Pro. Restoring never does. Nothing is uploaded by default, and Weave Vault is excluded from ordinary iPhone and Finder backups by design, so a routine backup of the phone never contains it. Browsing and exporting your own files work without a subscription, including if Pro lapses. Free is up to 3 vaults and 50 files per vault. Pro is a monthly subscription, an annual subscription with a 7-day trial, or a one-time lifetime purchase.

The recovery trade-off is plain. Each vault has its own 12-word recovery phrase. If you lose both the pattern and the phrase, we do not hold a copy, and there is no support process that can override this. Write the phrase down and keep it somewhere that is not your phone.

Showing one album to one person

You want a relative to see a set of photos once, without handing over your phone or your pattern. Secure sharing sends a point-in-time copy of a whole vault, re-keyed from scratch each time, with an enforced expiry. You can revoke it early from Shared vaults in the vault's settings.

Because sharing sends the whole vault, put the photos you want to show in a vault of their own first. Recipients do not need a vault of their own and do not need to pay for anything.

Weave Vault runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 16+) and Android. There is no Windows, Mac, or web app, and no web signup. If you want to compare how other approaches handle this, see private photo vault for iPhone and how a photo vault actually works.