Sending secure images with Confidencial

ℹ️ Let’s say you’re Happy Traveler, a tourist preparing to make a trip overseas. At your destination hotel, The Example Hotel, Bob at the front desk has asked for a photo of your passport. You understand the risks of sending sensitive info over plain old email, and don’t want to subject yourself to possible identity theft.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do this anymore. With Confidencial, you can add a layer of protection to your image that ensures it will be “end-to-end encrypted.” That is, the whole time the image is on your machine, the whole time it’s on your recipient’s machine, and at all times in between, the image can stay protected.

Let’s see the modern way to securely share a photo…

1. Open the Confidencial desktop app or go to my.confidencial.io and log in if you haven’t done so already

2. Drag your passport photo on to the encryption box of the Encryption Tools page

   
3. The photo will open in the Confidencial Image Protector. Add Bob to your recipient list in the right taskpane. You can do so by entering his email address, or, if you’ve sent to him before, click in the input box to show a list of your recent recipients.

   

   💡 If Bob has never used Confidencial before, you will be asked to invite him after you enter his email address. Simply click the green invite button. Bob will be able to view your protected photo as soon as he verifies his email address with Confidencial.

   
4. You and Bob are now in the recipients list

   

   ℹ️ The recipients list determines who can view protected content. You are automatically added as a recipient of any message or file you encrypt, so you will always be able to decrypt any message or file you protect.

5. Select a sensitive part of the photo by clicking and dragging a box over it

   

   ℹ️ The Confidencial Image Protector currently supports PNG and JPEG images. Other image types can be encrypted using Confidencial’s “C11” file format (see Encrypting files and folders). “Native” support for other image types is coming soon.

6. Click Encrypt Selection in the right taskpane

   
7. The selected portion is now protected. Repeat Steps 5 and 6 for each portion you’d like to protect.

   
8. Click the download (save) button to save the protected image to your disk

   

   💡 Pro tip: When you download (save) the image, you can overwrite the original version of the image. Doing so will replace the original, unprotected image with a protected, Confidencial image.

   
9. Now that you’ve saved your Confidencial image, send it to Bob however you like. You can use email, iMessage, Slack, Teams…any method you prefer. Since access control is built directly into this image, Confidencial’s protection stays with it no matter where it goes or how it gets there.

✅ You’ve now sent your passport the safe way - the Confidencial way! If any unauthorized user intercepts your message or otherwise gets their hands on your image, below is all they will see. Only your designated encryption recipients (Bob in this example) will be able to see the protected content using Confidencial.