Blur to hide. Lock with your fingerprint.
A sensitive-media vault, biometric app and collection locks, and an encrypted database for faces, places, text and embeddings.
Security in a gallery is mostly about two questions: who can open it, and what leaks out through side channels like widgets and previews. Pixel Gallery answers both.
Locks
- App lock: require biometrics to open the app.
- Vault lock: require biometrics to view sensitive media.
- Collection locks: any collection can require biometrics on its own.
Sensitive media
Mark media as sensitive and it is blurred in the grid. It stays out of widgets, stories and preview surfaces, shows a generic pin on the map, and is excluded from Home-View by default. The vault is where you go to see it.
Encrypted metadata
Everything the AI pipeline derives, including faces, face vectors, locations, labels, recognized text, colors and semantic embeddings, is stored in a database encrypted with SQLCipher. The key is generated on the device and lives in the Android Keystore. That database and its key are excluded from Android backup.
Collections, favorites and descriptions are kept in a separate, unencrypted database, and your photo files are never modified.
What this is not
Pixel Gallery does not offer end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, because it has no cloud. It is a local gallery with local locks. The full picture is on the Privacy first page.
Guides
Questions about vault & security
Are my photos encrypted?
The metadata database that holds faces, places, recognized text and embeddings is encrypted with SQLCipher. Photo files themselves stay ordinary files on your storage.
Where do hidden photos disappear from?
Sensitive media is blurred in the grid and excluded from widgets, stories and browsing previews. On the map it shows a generic pin instead of the exact spot.
Is there a PIN alternative to biometrics?
The lock uses Android's biometric prompt, which falls back to your device credential.
Guides
Free on Google Play
Requires Android 13 or newer. No account. Optional one-time Premium upgrade.