Free version no longer useful – Secret Photo Vault-Manager LS Review

8/11/19 update. I completed exporting those few unique images from the app, mostly just some screen shots of some PDF’s that I don’t already have elsewhere and have deleted the app. Today I opened the LS to see that the author has essentially removed all usefulness from the free version of the app. The initial thumbnail panel has been split with more than 60% now displaying advertising and only very tiny images of my documents. The document images are now so tiny now that I cannot tell one from another forcing me to open one document after another trying to find what I needed, I was not successful. I understand the author trying to monetize his product to develop a reliable cash-flow by subverting the subscription sales model but this is not a data providing service, it’s only a simple app with modest functionality at best, it’s known as a “Hostage Subscription”. If it were directly sold at a reasonable price I might purchase it, but I won’t re-purchase it every month to the tune of about $25.00/year or $39.99 one-time. Let’s be realistic, this is, in essence, a very simple utility, it stores and displays images from a local data-store and provides decent security, but thats all it really does. And the drawbacks are many: Its expensive, provides no real editing, no networking, no cross platform capability at all, no search indexing, and no backup/restore capability, lose your phone, your data’s gone. As a comparison, I am a decades long user of LastPass which does provide all of the above plus, far more, even to direct data store with mapping, AES 256 during store and transit, it’s platform agnostic, supports all versions of Windows, IOS, OSX, Linux, Android and most any other platform. On all platforms including IOS and Android it provides off-line local access through local data storage with auto synchronization across all platforms and devices, both local store and Cloud. I credit the author for producing the application but fault him/her for choosing a Subscription sales mode where it is inappropriate.
Review by Al Havemann on Secret Photo Vault-Manager LS.