Some photos are nobody's business but yours. Not your family's, not your friends', and frankly not ours either.
Secret Albums are a separate section of the app behind a PIN. Everything you put in there is scrambled on your phone before it uploads, so what lands on our servers is gibberish. We can't look at your photos. Not "we've promised not to" and not "only if you ask nicely". We genuinely cannot.
Setting it up
- Open Profile → Secret Albums.
- First time only, set a PIN. Four digits minimum.
- Type the PIN to unlock the section.
- Tap New secret album, or press and hold a normal album and choose Make secret.
- Add photos and videos exactly like anywhere else.
How they behave
Secret albums disappear from Home and All Albums for everyone in them, not just you. Somebody who hasn't unlocked the section doesn't see the album, doesn't see a locked box where the album used to be, doesn't see anything. As far as the app is concerned it isn't there.
Videos work too, and unscramble when you open them.
By default, photos in a secret album can be looked at in the app but not saved to anyone's phone.
Letting someone save one
View-only is the default, but whoever uploaded a photo gets to decide about that photo.
- Open the photo.
- Press and hold it.
- Flip Members can download on or off.
Only the person who put the photo there can make that call. If it's off, long-press and save just refuses.
Sharing one
You can still share a secret album with somebody you trust, and they can add their own photos like any other album. Theirs show up for you and everyone else in it.
If you invite people by text from your contacts, the album name is deliberately left out of the message. It would rather defeat the object.
Right, the serious bit
Your PIN lives on your device. It is not on our servers. That is exactly why any of this means anything.
It also means a forgotten PIN is a genuine disaster, not an inconvenience. This is not a password reset. There is no "click here and we'll email you a link". If nobody has the PIN, those photos are scrambled forever, for you and for us, and no amount of emailing support will change that.
Pick something you'll remember. Write it down somewhere sensible. We cannot rescue you, and we'd hate to have to tell you that in an email.
One more: if somebody is removed from a secret album, they can't decrypt it any more. That's the feature working, not a bug.
What it doesn't do
Encryption stops our servers reading your photos, stops other Albumer users reading them, and stops anybody without your PIN reading them.
It does not stop a person you deliberately invited from taking a screenshot of their own screen. No app on earth can do that. Invite people you trust.
Photos in secret albums are also left out of the select-and-move tools, in both directions, so nothing wanders in or out by accident.