Crypta wants to be your photo vault, but iOS already has one.

Crypta is a passcode-and-Face-ID-gated container for photos and videos imported from the Camera Roll. You pick what to bring in, the originals get deleted from Photos, and the encrypted copies sit inside the app behind biometric auth. There is a fake-passcode decoy mode that opens a second, empty-looking vault if you're handing the phone to someone who's asking pointed questions, and an intruder-selfie option that fires the front camera on a failed unlock.

Albums are flat, sortable by date or filename, and support drag-to-reorder. Import is the standard PHPickerViewController flow, so you get the modern Photos sheet rather than a custom grid. Export drops items back into the Camera Roll one at a time or as a batch share sheet.

There is no cloud sync. Everything lives on-device, which is the right architectural call for a privacy app but means losing the phone means losing the vault. iCloud backup of the app's container is the only recovery path, and that depends on whether you have iCloud Backup turned on at all.

The app is genuinely clean. No banner ads, no upsell modals every third tap, no "watch a video to unlock this folder" pattern that plagues the rest of the vault category on the App Store. The unlock animation is fast, Face ID is the default, and the import / export round-trip works without re-encoding the originals into something lossy.

The pricing is honest: a one-time purchase unlocks the full feature set, with no recurring subscription for what is fundamentally a local storage app. That alone puts it ahead of half its competitors, which charge $4.99 a month to hide a folder.

The bigger problem is structural. iOS has shipped a Hidden Photos album since iOS 14 — passcode-protected since iOS 16, hidden entirely from the main library, and accessible only from inside Photos behind Face ID. For the most common use case ("I don't want this image to appear when I hand my phone to someone"), the OS feature is already there, already encrypted with the device key, already backed up to iCloud, and already free.

Crypta's pitch has to be the extras — the decoy passcode, the intruder selfie, the album-level organisation — and those extras need to be airtight to justify the workflow tax of pulling photos out of Photos and into a sandboxed app. The vault category on iOS has a long, ugly history of apps that lost user libraries to a botched update or a forgotten passcode with no recovery path. Crypta has not stumbled here, but it inherits the category's reputation either way.

Install Crypta if you've outgrown Hidden Photos and specifically want decoy-passcode behavior or per-album organisation that the OS album doesn't give you. Skip it if your actual need is "hide a few photos from someone glancing at my phone" — Settings → Photos → Hidden Album does that for free with better recovery guarantees. And whatever you do, don't move your only copy of anything irreplaceable into any third-party vault, this one included.