Google Photosintroduced Locked Folder, a space meant to cordon off your sensitive pics to prevent accidental sharing, in 2022. The feature has historically been offline-only — which made sense from a privacy perspective, but also meant you were liable to lose the contents of your Locked Folder if you reset your device or cleared Google Photos’s app data. We’ve known cloud backup functionality was coming to Locked Folder for quite some time, but now,as spotted by 9to5Google, it’s finally beginning to roll out to users.
Users are starting to see a prompt in the Google Photos app to enable Locked Folder backup — including some of us here at AP. Selecting “Turn on backup” will upload your Locked Folder photos to the cloud, making them accessible from any device where you’re able to access your Google Photos content and preventing them from being erased if you happen to lose your local Google Photos data. Crucially, this feature is opt-in, meaning you won’t upload any of your risky business to the cloud by accident. If you see the pop-up and don’t want to enable the feature, tapping “Not now” will keep your Locked Folder contents offline.
Images in your Locked Folder aren’t visible in your normal Google Photos timeline and can’t be shared to other apps. The Locked Folder is secured with your device’s screen lock — or, at the desktop interface at photos.google.com/lockedfolder, with your normal Google account login credentials. Locked Folder backup seems to be opt-in per-device, so if you add pictures to the Locked Folder on a device where you haven’t enabled backup, they’ll stay local to that device. you may also opt out of backup on devices where you previously enabled it to stop uploading new additions.
We first caught wind that Locked Folder would be getting a cloud backup optionway back in Februaryvia a leak on the Google News Telegram channel. Shortly after a Google services enthusiast going by AssembleDebug managed to get cloud backup working andposted a video of it on Twitterlast month, Googleformally confirmed that Locked Folder would be getting optional cloud backupin the near future.
The rollout is ongoing, so you might not have the option just yet — but you should see it soon. Naturally, uploading any data to the cloud increases the risk that it could make its way out into the world by accident. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Google Photos may have a strong security track record, but you should still seriously considerenabling two-factor authentication on your Google account, especially if you’re storing sensitive data there.
