Telephoto

July 12, 2026 · View on GitHub

Telephoto Logo

A lightweight, privacy-first alternative to Google Photos — powered by Telegram

Unlimited backups • No subscriptions • Your data, your control

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🌐 Website • 💬 Telegram

📸 What is Telephoto?

Telephoto is a simple, privacy-focused Android app that backs up your photos and videos to Telegram using a bot you control.

Unlike traditional cloud services, your media goes directly to your own Telegram chat — giving you unlimited storage, fast access, and full ownership of your data.

✨ Features

AI

  • AI auto caption - integrated Gemini chatgpt API to give you context about the image transcription translation and many more.

📤 Backup & Storage

  • Custom Telegram bot backup — your media is stored in your own Telegram chat
  • Unlimited cloud-style storage — no subscription lock-in
  • Video Backup — back up videos to your Telegram cloud
  • Manual Backup and Smart Sync — upload all files or only new/missing ones
  • High-resolution uploads — supports images up to 40 MB each
  • Image pre-conversion before upload — improves compatibility and upload reliability
  • Folder include/exclude controls — choose exactly what gets backed up

🎮 Media Viewing & Organization

  • Video Player — play videos directly inside Telephoto
  • Reel Mode — short-video style continuous viewing experience
  • Video Player Gesture Control — quick gestures for seek, volume, and brightness
  • Library overview — quick summary of your media library
  • Infocards in Gallery — see useful status and media insights at a glance
  • Memories card — reminders from past photos
  • Cloud Collection and Cloud Favorite — organize cloud media more easily
  • Collection cloud option — create/use cloud collections directly in Collection
  • Video Favorites — mark important videos for fast access
  • Video Collections — organize videos into custom collections
  • Card pinning — keep important cards at the top
  • Cloud preview UI — added Favorite and Info buttons

👁️ View Options

  • Cloud view options — grouping, sorting, filtering, grid view, and list view
  • Local tab view options — group, sort, filter, grid view, list view, and tree view
  • Grid column control — adjustable 2 to 6 columns
  • Offline OCR (100+ languages) — search screenshots, documents, and text photos
  • Parallel OCR and improved OCR workflow — faster, cleaner recognition and updates
  • Per-image OCR reprocessing — refresh OCR for selected images when needed

⚙️ System & Reliability

  • Improved upload/delete/OCR pipeline — better overall media processing flow
  • Improved background operation — more reliable long-running tasks
  • Improved delayed cloud deletion algorithm — safer cloud cleanup handling
  • Auto migration for local image collections — smoother upgrades
  • Encrypted database backup and restore — secure metadata/settings portability
  • Database backup reminder card — prompts you to protect app data
  • Use Telephoto as a viewer from other apps — open and view images directly

🆕 What's New in Version 60

🔄 Cross-Device Synchronization

Sync your media seamlessly across all your devices — changes made on one device reflect everywhere

📂 Optimized Collection Tab

Faster, smoother, and more intuitive collection management

📝 Rich Captions

  • Image Captions — add descriptive text to your photos
  • Markdown Support — format your captions with bold, italic, links, and more
  • Tags & Hashtags — organize and discover photos with #tags
  • Common Caption — apply the same caption to multiple images at once

New optimized search algorithm for faster and more accurate results

🖼️ Improved Media Viewing

  • Optimized Image Viewer — smoother zooming and navigation
  • QR Code Scanner — scan QR codes directly from images
  • Revamped UI — fresh new look for image preview and cloud image preview
  • Thumbnail Wheel — quickly scrub through images with an intuitive thumbnail slider

⚡ Quality of Life

  • Tap to Scroll to Top — quickly return to the top of any list with a single tap
  • Recent Favorites — quickly access your most recently favorited items
  • Sync ID Implementation — improved backend tracking for reliable synchronization

📱 Home Screen Widgets (Android 16+)

Official widget support — view your memories and recent photos right from your home screen

Version 60 brings powerful cross-device sync, rich Markdown captions with hashtags, a completely revamped UI, and official Android 16+ widget support. Update today to experience the future of privacy-first cloud backup.

🖼️ Screenshots

📱 Getting Started

1️⃣ Installation

Download the latest APK and install it on your Android device.

Download Latest APK

Latest on GitHub: 60.0

2️⃣ The Bot Setup

  1. Open @BotFather and send /newbot
  2. After bot creation, copy only the HTTP API token from BotFather reply (format: 123456:ABC-DEF...)
  3. Open your new bot chat and send /start
  4. Open @Check_Telegram_IDBot (or @ScanIDBot) and choose which ID you want: User ID or Group ID
    • If you choose User ID, copy your numeric ID (example: 987654321) and use it directly in Telephoto
    • If you choose Group ID, first add your created bot to that group and set it as admin, then copy the group ID (usually starts with -)
  5. Paste the bot token + selected ID into Telephoto Settings

What to copy: Copy only the bot token and one ID value (user ID or group ID). Do not copy bot usernames, labels, or extra reply text.

Example:

  • 123456:ABC-DEF... (bot token)
  • 987654321 (user ID) or -1001234567890 (group ID)

3️⃣ Required Permissions

🛑 Manual Action Required

Settings > Apps > Telephoto > Permissions → Enable "Files and media"

🛠️ Tech Stack

  • Flutter & Dart
  • Telegram Bot API
  • On-device OCR (Tesseract)

🌐 Website • 📢 Telegram Channel • 💬 Discussion Group • 📥 Download APK