Guides / Photos of your keys

Is it safe to post a photo of your keys?

Updated 5 November 2026 · By the FirstHour team

Short answerIt's better not to. In 2008, university researchers showed that a key can be copied from a photograph of it. That study is old, and we can't tell you how easy it is today. Our advice: don't post a clear picture of a key, and delete or lock away the ones you have. You don't need to panic over a picture you took a while ago.

What the research showed

In 2008, computer scientists at UC San Diego presented a paper called "Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding". Their software, which the university's news release calls Sneakey, could work out how to make a copy of a key from a photograph, without the key itself.

The university's news release says they worked with common residential house keys, and that photos from a cell phone camera gave the information needed to make identical copies. It also says they successfully decoded a key image captured from 195 feet away with a telephoto lens, and warns that photos of keys on a photo-sharing site such as Flickr could be used to make duplicates.

It was a research demonstration from 2008. We didn't find an official source on how easy it is today, so we won't guess.

What to do with key photos

  1. Don't post a clear picture of a key. This is our advice. That includes the "new home" picture of a key in your hand.
  2. Find the ones you have. This is our advice: try the Photos search with a word like "key" and look through the results, which vary. Here's how to search Photos.
  3. Delete them if you don't need them. Apple says a photo you delete can be recovered from Recently Deleted for 30 days, then it's deleted permanently. How Recently Deleted works.
  4. If you must keep one, our advice is to lock it away in the Vault or another place with its own lock, or cover the key before you share it.

If a clear photo was already posted

Our advice: take the post down, and ask anyone you sent it to to delete it. Deleting yours doesn't delete a copy someone else saved.

This is our advice: if the photo was public and clearly showed the key's cuts, think about having the lock changed. If it was a blurry shot, or one only a few people saw, you may decide it isn't worth it. That's your call.

How FirstHour helps

Be clear about one thing first: Protect doesn't look for photos of physical keys. Its groups are for things like card numbers, IDs, backup codes and recovery phrases (the full list). FirstHour won't find your key photos for you, so you'd need to find them yourself.

Once you have one, you can add it to the Vault from Photos. FirstHour locks a copy, checks it opens, and only then does iPhone ask to remove the original. And if you want to share a picture with a key in it, Black out lets you draw a solid black box over any part of the picture and saves a copy, with your original unchanged. It suggests boxes for the numbers, names and signatures it finds, so you would draw the one over the key yourself. Look over the whole picture before you send it.

Questions

Can someone copy a key from any photo?

We don't know. The 2008 researchers ran tests on residential house keys, and we haven't found an official source on everyday photos today. Our advice is to keep clear, close pictures of keys private.

What about car keys and key fobs?

The university's news release covers house keys. We haven't found an official source on car keys or fobs, so we haven't written about them.

Is a picture of just the key's head safe?

We don't have a source on that. Our advice is to keep any clear picture of a key private, whichever part shows.

Sources

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