Safelight:Photo Vault & Search

Geek Tech2 Studio

About this app

Safelight is a private photo gallery with an encrypted vault and an AI search that runs entirely on your phone. Hide photos in the vault, then find any picture by describing it — "passport", "receipt", "the whiteboard photo" — with no internet connection and no account.

The app requests no INTERNET permission at all. You can check that yourself in Android's app info. Your photos, the search index and the encryption key never leave this device, because there is nowhere for them to go.

🔒 Encrypted photo vault and private album
• AES-256-GCM envelope encryption, with a key derived from your PIN and kept only on this phone
• Photos moved into the vault disappear from your gallery and from every other app on the device
• Unlock with a PIN or with your fingerprint or face
• A 16-character recovery code, shown once, is the only way back in if you forget your PIN — nobody can reset it for you
• Auto-lock after a timeout, and vault screens are blocked from screenshots and from the recents preview

🔍 Offline AI photo search — describe it instead of scrolling
• Search by meaning, not by filename or folder: "beach sunset", "a blue car", "the cat on the sofa"
• The AI model is bundled inside the app. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is analyzed on a server
• Indexing runs in the background on this phone, and you can restrict it to charging time
• Nothing to maintain — no tags, no albums, no manual sorting

🗝️ Search inside the vault too
Hidden photos stay findable. Their index is encrypted with the vault's own key and is read only while the vault is unlocked, so the vault is private without becoming the place where things get lost.

🧹 Remove EXIF location before you share
• Share a photo through Safelight to strip GPS coordinates, capture time, camera model, serial number and editing history
• Lossless on JPEG, PNG and WebP — the image is never re-encoded, so quality is untouched
• It writes a clean copy and leaves your original file exactly as it was
• Formats that cannot be cleaned without re-encoding are flagged rather than shared quietly

🖼️ A complete gallery, not a stripped-down one
• All photos, favorites, folders and recycle bin, grouped by date, in a grid or a list
• Full-screen viewer with an info panel showing exactly what metadata a photo carries
• Rotate and resize; other edits open in your editor of choice
• JPEG, PNG, GIF, APNG, WebP, HEIC, SVG, RAW, MP4, MKV and more
• Recycle bin, so a mis-tap stays recoverable

📦 Why the download is large
The search model ships inside the app instead of living on a server. That is the whole reason your photos never need to be uploaded: the intelligence comes to the photos rather than the photos going to a data center.

🙅 What Safelight does not do
No ads. No trackers. No analytics. No account, no sign-in, no cloud backup. Nothing is synced anywhere — which also means that if you lose both the phone and the recovery code, the vault is gone. That trade-off is the product, not an oversight.

Face blurring and text redaction are still in development and are not part of this version.

Hide photos, lock a private album, search a photo library by description and remove EXIF data before sharing — all offline, on one device.

📬 Feedback and ratings
Something broken, or something missing? Write to [e-mail] — every message is read by the person who builds the app. And if Safelight earns its place on your phone, a rating on Play helps other people find it.

Source code: https://codeberg.org/geektech54/safelight

What’s new

Smoother transitions, and feedback that actually reaches us.

• Moving between Search and your photos now fades properly — no dropped frames, no grid jumping.
• The bottom navigation animates when you switch tabs.
• Fixed: mail sent from the About screen went to an address we no longer read. It reaches us now.
• Rating the app opens its Play page directly, with no dialog in between.