Gallery Lock - Lock Photos & Hide Videos

Pros

• Hide photos and videos
• Stealth mode
• Cloud backup

Cons

• In-app ads

Gallery Lock for Android is a free tool that helps you protect your photos and videos.

Gallery Lock — Lock Photos and Hide Videos is a tool that you can use to block your photos and videos from someone that may have access to your device. The app is developed by FRAUMOBI, and while it defaults to English, it is available in a wide range of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Gallery Lock features its own gallery and is not specific to the gallery app often provided as defaultware with Android devices. You can choose to have all of your videos and photos automatically hidden or locked or choose which are on a per-item basis. The first time you run the app, you choose a pin number. Each subsequent time you activate the app, you must enter that pin. Once entered, you can change the pin, but pin recovery did not seem simple, so take care to safeguard it.

This app also features a stealth mode, which we highly recommend using for maximum privacy. What stealth mode does is eliminate icons and all other traces that the app is installed. Only you will know that it is there, and that makes it much less likely that someone will brute force the pin.

The program has a share mode that allows you to use your photos and videos as you otherwise would if they were not locked and hidden. That means that you can share to your social platforms via a web browser but also to any other apps that would otherwise have access to those images and/or videos.

Cloud mode lets you set up a Google Drive, Dropbox or other cloud account. Whenever Gallery Lock is updated, it will sync with the cloud as soon as Internet access is available. We highly recommend cloud backup in the event you lose your pin or uninstall the app. Folders are also supported, which means that you can organize your content within Gallery Lock, and that organization will be mirrored on the cloud.

The app boasts many other features as well. You can use a pattern in place of a pin number. It supports a wide range of viewing modes. It can rotate and zoom. You can use Gallery Lock to make slideshows fast, and those slideshows can even have music playing in the background via a playlist. Multi-select lets you lock, hide, unlock and unhide multiple files fast.

Gallery Lock is available in the ad-supported version provided here. The ads are not particularly obnoxious, but we did find ourselves going into airplane when we were performing many tasks within the app. If you prefer an ad-free experience, you can pay to upgrade. If you uninstall Gallery Lock without unhiding photos and videos—either because you are finished with the app or have upgraded—your content is lost forever, which feels like a clumsy way to handle it.

Pros

• Hide photos and videos
• Stealth mode
• Cloud backup

Cons

• In-app ads