Captions, comments and voice notes are now encrypted too
Your family's photos and videos have been end-to-end encrypted for a while now: they are encrypted on the phone that sends them and can only be opened by the phones of the people you invited. The words around them were not. A caption often says more than the picture does - the name, the birthday, the first day at the new school, the hospital you were in - and until now those words sat on our servers as ordinary text. From the latest version of the app they are encrypted too, along with the comments your family leave and the voice notes they send.
The caption is often the private part
It is easy to think of a family group as a pile of pictures, but the writing around them is what turns it into a record of your family. "Her first steps, three days before her birthday." "Home at last." "Nana at 84." That is real detail about real children, and it should be no more readable to us than the photographs are. So now it is not.
- Captions - whatever you write on a photo when you add it, or edit onto it later.
- Comments - everything your family write underneath, from a grandparent's long message to a single line.
- Voice notes - the recordings you leave on a photo are encrypted as a file in exactly the way a video is.
The encryption even hides how much you wrote, so a short comment and a long one look the same from the outside. What we hold is a sealed envelope with no way to open it, because the key never leaves your family's devices.
What about everything already written
Those captions and comments stay as they are for the moment, and that is deliberate. Encrypting them today would mean anyone in your family still on an older version of Clann would open the app and find a padlock where the words used to be, and we could not give them back - we do not have the key. So the change starts with what you write from now on, and we will encrypt the older writing once everyone has had time to update.
There is nothing for you to do
There is no setting for this. If your family group is encrypted - every group created since August 2026 is, and older ones once an admin turns encryption on - it simply starts happening. The one thing worth doing is making sure everyone in the family updates the app, so that nobody is left looking at a padlock instead of your caption.
Frequently Asked Questions
Encrypted ones. Every family group created since August 2026 is encrypted from the first photo, and an older group becomes encrypted whenever one of its admins turns it on. In a family group that has not been encrypted yet there are no keys to lock anything with, so captions and comments there stay as they are.
No. They are encrypted on your phone before they are sent, with a key that only your family's devices hold. What reaches us is a sealed envelope we have no way to open, and that is true of us, of anyone who obtained our data, and of anyone we might one day be asked to hand it to.
Nothing right now. They stay exactly as they are, and everyone in your family group can still read them. We will encrypt them too, but only once the whole family has had time to update the app - if we did it today, anyone still on an old version would suddenly find a padlock on comments they could read yesterday, and we could not give them back.
Yes, to see new captions and comments. An older version of Clann has no way to open the new encrypted writing, so it shows a padlock and a short note instead. Updating fixes it straight away.
Keep what you write to yourselves
