Google Photos’ Locked Folder Doesn’t Sync With the Cloud
According to a report by Android Police, the newly announced Locked Folder feature in Google Photos only works for your local photos. As soon as you put your photos in this folder, those photos are removed from your Google Photos cloud account.
What that means is that you can’t have access to your locked photos on your other Photos-enabled devices.
How Locked Folder Works in Google Photos
If you don’t already know, Locked Folder is a newly announced feature that lets you hide sensitive photos in your Google Photos account. With this feature, you can move any of your photos to a secret folder.
You can access this folder from the Library > Utilties menu in Google Photos on your device.
Accessing this folder requires entering a certain form of authentication. You can use your phone’s PIN or biometric authentication to get inside this secret folder.
Limitations With Google Photos’ Locked Folder
A newly learned major limitation with this feature is that the feature is only capable of hiding photos locally. What this means is that, when you hide a photo with this feature, your photo is downloaded locally to your phone and then moved to the secret folder.
The photo gets removed from your main Google Photos library and across all your Photos-enabled devices.
Since the locked photo is only stored on your phone, you lose the photo forever if you lose or break your device. For a service like Google Photos that primarily relies on the cloud, this limitation doesn’t really make much sense.
How to Get a Locked Folder-Like Feature on Android
The thing is that you don’t actually need Locked Folder to arrive as you can already lock files on your Android devices. For example, using Files by Google (free), you can move all your sensitive photos (and other files) to a hidden folder.
Then, when you want, you can access this folder and view all your hidden files. Of course, you’ll need to authenticate yourself before you can open this folder.
A Huge Limitation With Locked Folder in Google Photos
With Locked Folder only working locally, it’s a huge disappointment to the users who use Google Photos on their multiple devices. But if you only use the service on a single device, you might want to try the feature out.
