Password manager images workflow?

November 3, 2019 6:03 AM

My dad has five sheets of physical paper filled with account information and passwords. I'd like to backup this information by taking pictures and storing those images in a password manager, rather than typing everything out, now, and verifying that I got everything correct. But, I don't want the images to end up in iCloud or something. And I don't know which password managers support image storage, anyway.

Are there password managers that have a server/cloud component, with a computer application and a phone app, that would let me take "secure pictures" on the phone app?

Can anyone think of a good workflow?

Should I turn off icloud on my phone, take the pictures, get them onto my mac via airdrop, backup the images somewhere, delete them from my phone, and turn icloud back on?

I'm looking for other simple/fast/creative ideas.

posted by zeek321 to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: LastPass has cloud storage and supports images. I just tested it, and a photo I took inside the LastPass app did NOT show up in my camera roll, which suggests that it won't go to iCloud, but I don't use iCloud so I couldn't test that part.
posted by moonmilk at 6:17 AM on November 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: 1Password has a cloud service, supports storing photos, has computer and phone apps. It lets you upload photos taken directly inside the phone app, so you won’t need to disable iCloud.
posted by zsazsa at 6:20 AM on November 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

Just an FYI: I had a catastrophic sync fail with LastPass and had to go through a lot of trouble to fix the issues. Since then, we've used 1Password successfully without issue.
posted by ancient star at 7:25 AM on November 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

There's a chance you or your dad have a non-phone digital camera somewhere-- using that'll save you, mostly, from the threat of cloud sharing when you add it to your Mac (the old-fashioned way, with a cable or memory-card reader). A borrowed scanner, or one rented at FedEx Office (e.g.) would probably also do the trick.

One option, once the pics are on your Mac, is OCR software. That's Optical Character Recognition. most OCR software isn't awesome at reading handwriting, though, so it'll stumble on or ignore cursive, while hopefully doing well on block letters and other print script.

Any OCR process will still require some manual checking, but you just need to figure out how many you can tolerate doing in 1 sitting; this project doesn't have to be completed in a day. Once it's typed and checked, though, you can likely import into 1Password/LastPass. You can do as I do and use KeePass, which is a password manager without a cloud service behind it. The Windows client does imports-- can't check the Mac client right now.
posted by Sunburnt at 11:52 AM on November 3, 2019