Most of us use our Android smartphones as a primary source of taking and sharing pictures. But, what we often ignore is the fact, is privacy.

For instance, there are often instances when we are required to share photos privately with only a selected bunch of people. Not just that, even while you are uploading your photos on a variety of social media platforms, you shouldn’t just select photos and hit the upload option.

Here we are going to talk about ways you can share photos on Android while maintaining security and privacy.

Best Ways To Share Photos On Android and iOS Privately

First and Foremost Be Mindful With Whom You Are Sharing Your Photos

Before you hit the share button or choose a platform where you are going to upload your photos, here are a few things that you should ponder upon –

• Do you wish to share your photos with an individual, specific group of friends, or with the whole world?
• Where do you want to share your photos? Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc
• Are there any details that you may want to hide? We’ll cover this up in greater detail in the next point

Get Rid of The EXIF Data

A photo is indeed worth a thousand words but when sharing photos on Android, you wouldn’t reveal what’s going on at the back of the image. Here’s what we are talking about –

Let’s say you took a stunning picture of the barbeque gathering on the lawn in front of your house. You used the right shutter speed, ISO, and many other such things. The pictures were so beautifully captured that all your friends and other acquaintances wanted you to share them.

Now, here are certain aspects of the images that you might not want others to know such as –

• The geo-location
• The date and time at which the photos were taken
• The camera make and model, focal length, shutter speed, and ISO (especially if you use a certain technique that you want to keep a secret)

In that case, you should make it a point to remove such information from images. On an Android phone, you can use an app like Photo Exif Editor – Metadata Editor. It doesn’t just let you view EXIF data of your pictures but it even lets you modify and remove the data as well. Here are the steps to remove the EXIF information  –

1. Install Photo Exif Editor – Metadata Editor

2. Select images whose EXIF data you want to edit

3. Click on the edit icon (pencil-like icon)on the top

4. You can either choose to tap on a particular field and edit it or you can choose to remove EXIF metadata fields of your choice by tapping on the icon. Refer to the screenshots below for the same

Use A Cloud-Based Storage Medium

There are often when you might want to keep the memories of an office trip amongst colleagues or when you might want to know the best way to share photos with family privately. For this, you can use a cloud storage medium like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and there are some other great cloud-based mediums as well.

Let’s consider an example of Google Drive. You can easily upload your memories on Google Drive and then share the folder with only a selected bunch of people. For this –

1. Select the photos that you want to upload to Google Drive. Once select tap on the share icon and choose Save To Drive as a preferred sharing option

2. Click on Allow when the permission pops up

3. Choose your account linked to Google Drive where you want to upload these selected images

4. Choose or create a folder where you want to upload these images

5. Click on the Select button at the bottom of the screen

6. Click on the Save option at the bottom-right corner of the screen

7. Now, here comes the important part, tap on the three-dotted icon next to the folder

8. Click on Share

9. Now add the email addresses of all the people with whom you want to share the images

On similar lines, you can restrict sharing of photos on a variety of cloud storage mediums. If you still need assistance on how you can share photos on Android or iOS privately using a cloud storage medium of your choice, do let us know in the comments section below.

Use A Third-Party App To Share Photos Privately

Best way to share photos privately with family. There are several apps both on Android and iOS that let you do that. Here we are going to take an example of one such wonderful app for iOS users.

Keep Photo Safe Vault is one of the best ways to share photos with family and friends privately. It lets you share locked photos right from within the app.

Apart from that here are some other features of the app –

• Locks photos behind a 6 digit pin
• Inbuilt image downloader and browser
• Click photos right from within the app
• Facial recognition supported
• PIN recovery option

Wrapping Up

When sharing photos on an Android or iOS device, you shouldn’t repent on your decision once you have shared a photo. And, for that, we hope that the above-mentioned tips and tricks will prove to be a life savior. If you like to read content like this, keep reading Tweak Library.