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Photos in WhatsApp’s disappearing chats no longer auto-save in your gallery

Photos in WhatsApp’s disappearing chats no longer auto-save in your gallery
Monique Casingal

Monique Casingal

  • Updated:

To keep media-sharing more secure, WhatsApp is rolling out a new update that automatically disables the option to view and auto-save media files from disappearing messages in a phone’s image gallery. This update is available on WhatsApp for Android and WhatsApp for iOS on both beta and public builds.

Disappearing messages is a cool WhatsApp feature that lets users send messages that will delete themselves after a set duration. Not only is it handy in clearing out storage space, but it also ensures that anything you’ve sent there won’t be saved by other people so easily.

The new update takes this even further by turning off media visibility by default for disappearing chats. Previously, it was enabled so Android users could view media like photos and videos that were set to vanish via their phone gallery, while iOS users will have the media auto-saved to their gallery. Now, you must manually enable it if you want to save them.

This new feature is the same concept for both operating systems but differs in what they cover. For Android, the option “Media Visibility” for disappearing messages is disabled so you can’t view the media via your gallery. For iOS, it’s the option “Save to Camera Roll” that’s turned off so images, videos, and GIFs from disappearing chats are no longer automatically saved in your camera roll. 

You can still save these files manually, though—or simply turn off disappearing messages. Either way, this is a pretty handy update since it provides extra privacy for the sender of the disappearing message. With the latest update of WhatsApp archived chats coming to the Windows platform, the popular instant chat app’s security is all the better.

Image credit: WABetaInfo

Monique Casingal

Monique Casingal

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