Gallery Guardian app polices the photos on your child’s smartphone

When your child gets their own smartphone, what’s your policy regarding the photos that they’re snapping and sharing with it?

I’ve heard a range of views, from parents who link the device with their own smartphone (e.g. using Apple’s iCloud system) so that they see every single photo their child takes, through to parents who are uneasy with any kind of ‘snooping’ on what their kids are doing.

The latter won’t approve of a new app called Gallery Guardian, but the former may be quite interested in it. It’s designed to be installed on your smartphone and your child’s, then it will analyse the photos on their device, and ping you an alert if it detects anything “suspicious”.

What’s suspicious in this case? “Gallery Guardian detects nude images as the default,” explains the Frequently Asked Questions section of its website. “You can also enable detection of Lingerie/Underwear/Swimwear via the settings page.”

There are some caveats here. Gallery Guardian can only analyse the images in your child’s photo gallery on the phone; it can’t see the ones that are only seen and shared within apps (for example, Snapchat) unless they’re also downloaded to the gallery. It also can’t do video yet, although its developer says that feature will be added in the future.

The app can also only give you a time/date stamp and filename (if appropriate) of the suspicious image, rather than actually show it to you: so whenever you get an alert, the only way to see what it’s referring to will be to have a look at the phone itself.

A separate feature lets you set a ‘geo-fence’ to also alert you when your child leaves or arrives at certain locations: home and school for example.

I fall more into the category of parent that feels uneasy with this kind of software, partly because of questions about whether the security and privacy features are strong enough – Gallery Guardian does address those questions in its FAQ, in fairness. Another positive aspect here, I guess, is that the app is scanning images automatically and only alerting you when there may be a problem, rather than showing you everything your child is doing.

There’s a big question about whether children who are sending or accessing problematic photos will be saving them to their gallery, especially if (as I think you should) you’ve explained to them how this app works before installing it on their smartphone. But if sexting and suchlike is a big concern, Gallery Guardian may be worth a look.