One UI 8.5 brings private album feature, here's how it works

Samsung is finally delivering on a feature Galaxy users have been asking for for years. Until now, the only way to hide sensitive photos and videos on a Galaxy device was to move them into the Secure Folder.

That was a reliable but inconvenient workaround that locked those files away in a separate, sandboxed space. Doing anything with photos and videos stored in Secure Folder required moving them out and then putting them back in.

With One UI 8.5, that’s finally changing. Samsung is introducing a feature called Private Album in the Gallery app, giving users a much simpler way to keep personal media out of sight.

So how does this work? It’s quite straightforward. Open any image or video, tap More (⋮), and select Move to private album. You can also send multiple items into the private album in one go.

You can access the private album by tapping the Menu button on the Gallery app’s home screen. It unlocks with your fingerprint or whichever screen lock method you use, and Samsung disables screenshots inside it for added privacy.

At the moment, the private album is pretty bare-bones. You can share files, move them back out, or delete them, and that’s about it. Media is organized strictly by date with no other sorting options.

Samsung could expand on this feature over time, but for now, the important thing is that the Gallery app finally offers a native way to keep your photos and videos private. You will be able to use it once your Galaxy phone or tablet is updated to One UI 8.5.

Abhijeet Mishra - Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]

First Samsung device: SGH-D500

Abhijeet's writing career started with guides for custom firmware for Samsung devices (including the original Galaxy S), and he moved to SamMobile in mid-2013 and worked up the ranks to Editor-in-chief. In addition to phones and mobile devices, his interests include gaming on both PC and console, PC hardware, and spending countless hours on YouTube watching videos on tech, movies, games, politics, and internet dramas.

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One UI 8.5 brings private album to Gallery app, here's how it works

Abhijeet Mishra - Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]

First Samsung device: SGH-D500