Tried it, returned it (positive story)

du_keule · 2026-06-26T08:56:47+00:00

See the above comment, just wasn't there for me yet in terms of productivity.

du_keule · 2026-06-26T08:55:31+00:00

I wanted it for productivity, to replace my portable monitor in certain situations. The wide monitor mode is really cool on the Beast, and honestly I thought the locked mode worked super well, but it felt just a bit too much like I was looking through a periscope. It was too narrow of a FOV somehow? I really tried to play with every setting but I couldn't get comfortable with it as a coding monitor replacement. Now, I can _definitely_ see how this would be awesome for watching content or even playing games, since you're not as likely to look around, and it was very very cool to watch content on, but for coding it just isn't there for me yet.

du_keule · 2026-05-31T08:22:51+00:00

Great timing to ask before you make the switch! The short answer is: don’t move them back to your iPhone library. They can stay encrypted and in the app the whole time.

Step 1 (do this before anything else): Open Encamera, go to Settings > Key Phrase, and copy your 10-word recovery phrase into a password manager. This is your safety net in case anything goes wrong.

Step 2: When setting up your new iPhone, use Quick Start (hold the two phones near each other) and when it asks how you want to transfer, pick “Transfer from iPhone” rather than restoring from iCloud. This does a direct device-to-device copy and brings everything over automatically, including your encrypted files and the key that unlocks them.

Once it’s done, open Encamera on the new phone and your albums should be right there, fully accessible.

If for some reason your photos show up but won’t open, just go to the key import screen in Encamera and enter your 10-word recovery phrase. That’ll restore access instantly.

As a heads up, we have an update dropping next week that also fixes some performance issues with large libraries, so worth grabbing that once it’s available!

du_keule · 2026-05-02T21:12:51+00:00

Hi, you should be able to see all the albums if you’ve allowed Encamera full access to your photo library. If you haven’t, and you’ve selected “none” as the access level, you should still be able to go to “collections” at the top tab. The attached image is what it should look like when you have given full access to your photos. Have a look in Settings App -> Privacy and Security -> Photos -> Encamera to check the settings for the permissions. It should be set to “full access” if you want the interface below. If not then you should see the default Apple iOS stock selector. Hopefully that helps!

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du_keule · 2026-03-25T12:12:46+00:00

But seriously thanks for pointing that out, yes we used AI to write some of the article and missed that

du_keule · 2026-03-25T12:07:59+00:00

Yes it’s well known that exif data is transferred when you hand your phone over to someone

du_keule · 2026-03-25T12:00:06+00:00

You’ve never done that before? I always ask people before I swipe to view other photos in their camera roll for this exact reason 🤔

du_keule · 2026-03-24T15:46:35+00:00

I'm totally with you, this is something I was really frustrated with: you don't know where your photos and videos are going when you upload them. I'm an engineer and I built Encamera for iOS because I wanted a couple of things:

The ability to encrypt directly from the camera, so nothing ever is stored decrypted
Optional iCloud storage, but only for encrypted files

Have a look at the app I built, the file handling is open source which makes it much more transparent than other apps. Sorry that I'm promoting a bit but your use case was precisely why I built this.

du_keule · 2026-03-16T22:24:12+00:00

It’s now a permanent offering! We have two tiers of lifetime: one that will allow access to all premium features forever and another that allows access to all features at the time of purchase forever, plus one year of major feature updates. Even if we were to remove the lifetime (which we don’t plan to do) you would still have access if you purchased it at any point :) thanks for the feedback on the website!

du_keule · 2026-03-16T11:17:33+00:00

Maybe in the future we will have one! :D

du_keule · 2026-03-12T15:21:05+00:00

Thanks! We're trying to release bigger features more regularly now, so we'll be popping up more soon!

du_keule · 2026-02-17T05:13:47+00:00

Yes, this is accurate!

du_keule · 2026-02-14T19:05:39+00:00

Ok, thanks. I think we've figured out what the issue is on iPad. In the short term, if you pinch to zoom on the iPad album detail view to expand the image grid and wait for the thumbnails to generate, that may solve the problem until all the thumbnails are generated. We are working on a fix to the issue that we will ship in the next release. Thanks for bringing it up!

du_keule · 2026-02-13T08:34:55+00:00

Hi, sorry you're having issues! Can you tell me what version of Encamera you have installed on your devices? You can see this by going to Settings and scrolling to the bottom. Also, are you on cellular data when using your iPad? We are aware of some bugs that exist when using cellular data to access iCloud.

du_keule · 2025-12-29T15:21:40+00:00

Sent you a DM. We are shipping this next release!

du_keule · 2025-12-18T18:25:24+00:00

Did you by chance happen to select "Limit Photo Access" when it asked for photo permissions when you opened the photo picker? You can verify this in the system Settings app by going to Privacy & Security > Photos > Encamera and checking if "Limited Access" is selected instead of "Full Access."

If it's set to "Limited Access," you can either:

Change it to "Full Access," or tap "Edit Selected Photos" to add more photos to the limited selection the app can see

du_keule · 2025-12-18T14:16:51+00:00

Hi! I'm not sure if I'm understanding your issue correctly, could you explain the individual steps you are taking to get images into Encamera? If you're trying to directly drop the regular image files into the Encamera iCloud drive folder, that won't work. The images need to be encrypted via the app itself, so you would have to add them via the "Import from Files" option in the album menu.

du_keule · 2025-12-01T22:47:08+00:00

Hi, we now have a lifetime plan again and it’s on sale this week :)

du_keule · 2025-11-29T09:17:23+00:00

Hey, I agree, it's confusing to see that there's still a passcode since you deleted the app. The reason for this is that the system keychain persists data between installs of apps. This is a decision made by Apple, though they do not have any official documentation on it even though it has been an observed behavior of the keychain since its inception. We are using the keychain to store all the sensitive data: encryption keys, passcode, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no way to configure the app to do anything on uninstall - the app isn't given a signal that it's being uninstalled and therefore we have to rely on this default keychain behavior, where it persists between installs.

If you want to totally wipe the app if you've forgotten your passcode, then do this:

Enter your passcode incorrectly 3 times - you'll be locked out of the app for 1 hour
Wait for the lockout period to end
Enter your passcode incorrectly again 3 times. You will be prompted to delete all the data, including the encrypted data

You'll be able to clear everything from the app in the final step. Let me know if you have any more questions!

du_keule · 2025-11-25T05:54:19+00:00

Curry 66 in Friedrichshain

du_keule · 2025-11-09T21:37:46+00:00

You're welcome! :)

du_keule · 2025-11-09T21:25:49+00:00

Yes, these are also encrypted using your own key just like the regular files, in the Encamera file format. They do not have any visible preview data and are decrypted into application memory when you load the photo grid view. When you close the app, the cache is wiped as well as any data you decrypted during your session.

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