Can you play a slideshow or open a PDF inside a photo vault?

Why the viewer matters

You spend most of your time in a vault looking at things. So the viewer has to be as good as the one in your phone’s own photo app. In our study of 836 App Store reviews, 71 users complain about organization or the viewer. Some lost a feature they used every day. One Keepsafe user wrote in 2025: “The app used to have a slideshow feature. Gone.”

York Vault ships a full viewer for photos, documents and audio, on iPhone, iPad and Android. Everything on this page is free, except the extra video formats in Plus and Pro.

Photos at full detail

• Zoom to full detail. Pinch in to see every pixel. Large photos load in tiles, so a 48 MP photo shows full detail fast.
• Swipe and rotate. Swipe to the next item. Rotate a photo that came in sideways.
• HDR and RAW. HDR photos show with their full brightness range. ProRAW photos from an iPhone show as they should.
• Animated images. GIFs and WebP files play.
• Your background. Pick a black or a light background.
• Keep the screen on. Turn this on, and the screen stays on while you look at a photo.

For video, Live Photos and the player, see Live Photos and video.

Documents inside the app

PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and text files open inside York Vault. In a PDF, you can search for a word and use page thumbnails to move through it.

York Vault opens each document from memory, or from a protected temporary file. It deletes that temporary file when you close the document. So no readable copy stays on the phone. This helps if you keep scans of IDs and papers, as many users do. See IDs and documents.

Audio

York Vault plays audio files and voice notes. Background play is off by default. The reason: the phone’s Lock Screen player would show the title of what plays. If you turn background play on, the Lock Screen shows a neutral title instead of the file name.

Slideshow

Play an album, or a selection, as a slideshow:

1. Open an album, or select the items you want.
2. Tap Slideshow.
3. Pick 2 to 10 seconds per slide.
4. Turn on Shuffle or Loop if you want.

Videos play inside the slideshow. Slideshow is on the Free plan.

Photo details

Swipe up on a photo to see its dates, size, format, camera, lens, exposure and location. The map in this panel loads only after you tap it. A map request goes to a map service, and it can show the area of the photo. So York Vault waits until you ask.

Show on a TV

When you connect a TV or a second screen, it shows a blank cover. Nothing from your library appears on it until you tap Show on TV. That choice lasts for the current session only.

On iPhone and iPad, this covers AirPlay. Apple notes that both devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network for AirPlay to a TV. When you are done, close the session, or lock York Vault. To leave the app fast, see quick exit.

More video formats (Plus and Pro)

York Vault plays the formats your phone plays, such as MP4, MOV and HEVC. With Plus or Pro, it also plays MKV, AVI, WebM and FLAC files inside the app. York Vault stores and exports every file in its original format, on every plan. So a file you add is the same file you get back. See pricing for what each plan includes.

How other apps do it

App	Viewer	Where we read it
Private Photo Vault	“Slideshow” with a choice of seconds and shuffle. No document viewer found.	App Store listing and app text
Keepsafe	“Full-screen and slideshow viewing for photos and videos”. Reviews from 2025 say it removed the slideshow.	App Store listing and our review study
LockMyPix	A slideshow with a set period. The shuffled slideshow is Premium.	App text
Privault	“The media player can decode up to 150 media formats”.	App Store listing

We read the app text in each App Store package in September 2026. We checked the listings on 2026-10-02.

Where to go next

Sort what you view with albums and organizing. Your items stay in your encrypted backup while you view them. To keep videos out of the camera roll first, read how to hide videos on iPhone.