How do I move photos into the vault, and are they deleted from Photos?
Pick them from the photo picker inside the vault. Each one is copied in and verified first, and only then are you asked whether to delete the originals — through the system’s own confirmation. Nothing is deleted before the copy is confirmed, so an interrupted import cannot lose a photo.
Reviewed 30 July 2026
The order is deliberate and it is not the order every app uses. Deleting first and copying second is how people lose photos to a cancelled transfer or a full disk.
- The free allowance is checked before anything is copied, so an import that cannot finish does not start and nothing is deleted.
- Each photo or video is copied into the vault, encrypted, and its catalogue entry is verified.
- Only for the items that actually arrived are you asked whether to delete the originals, and that deletion runs through the system’s own confirmation sheet.
Deleting from Photos puts the originals in Recently Deleted, where iOS keeps them for 30 days — worth knowing, because until you empty that album the photo still exists outside the vault.
Files from other apps come in through the document picker or the share sheet in the same way, and anything already in your FoxDL library can be moved in with a long press or multi-select.