Where to safely keep photos of your passport and documents on your phone

Where documents are kept badly

• In the camera roll. You hand the phone to a child, show a colleague the weekend photos, flip through pictures at the table — and the passport flashes between them. Lose the phone and it goes with the gallery.
• In chats. “Send me a photo of your passport” — and the scan lives in the conversation for years, on both sides and on the messenger's servers. Regular Telegram chats are not end-to-end encrypted, only secret chats are.
• In notes and “Files”. Better than the gallery, but without a separate password and often without encryption of the cloud copy.

What “safe” means for a document

Three conditions. A separate password: documents must not open together with the rest of the photos. Automatic locking: leave the app — it's locked, without your doing anything. Encryption before the cloud: the cloud copy must be a pile of bytes to everyone but you. If the service keeps the keys, the document is technically available to its staff and to whoever breaks into the server.

How it works in My Albums

• Secret album. Any album can be made secret: “⋯” on the album → “Make secret”, set a password. Its photos disappear from the gallery and search and open only with that password.
• Locks by itself. Minimise the app or open another chat — the album is locked. The other albums stay as they were.
• Encryption on the phone. Files, captions and dates are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before they're sent. The server stores bytes; the key is created on your device and never reaches us.
• At hand on every device. Need a scan on the computer — open My Albums in Telegram Desktop, enter the album password, download the original.
• You can check it. Open the document → “How this file looks on the server”. An encrypted file, not a picture.

How to hand over a document when you must

Download the original from My Albums and send it the way you trust, then delete it from the conversation on your side. There's no reason to keep it in the chat: it stays in the secret album.

How to lock documents away: step by step

1. Open @MyAlbumsBot, tap “Start”, then “Open photos”. The key is created by itself, on the phone.
2. “Albums” → “+” — create an album, say “Documents”. On it, “⋯” → “Make secret”, set a password.
3. Upload the scans: “Upload” → choose the files → pick this album. Or move ones already uploaded: select them in the gallery → “To album”.
4. Delete the documents from the phone's camera roll and from chats — now they live in one protected place.
5. Save the 52-character recovery code: without it, if both the phone and Telegram are lost, nobody can open the album.

We don't know the secret album's password and can't recover it: it never leaves your phone. Write it down where you keep the recovery code.

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