How to Stop Telegram Saving Pho­tos to Your Phone Gallery

If you wish to explore other social media platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram should be your immediate pick. Telegram is a very commonly used social media platform with millions of users. Just like WhatsApp, you can send and receive texts, images, videos, audio files, and documents.

Just like in WhatsApp, the auto-download feature for media files in Telegram is on by default. This means that whenever you are connected to the internet via Wi-Fi, all images and videos that you receive will be auto-downloaded and be saved in a local folder on your device. If you are an active Telegram user in several channels, you may end up with many photos and videos on your device that will consume your storage space. in another related article, we discussed how you can hide your phone number on Telegram.

Is there a way to stop Telegram from saving your photos to your gallery? Of course, yes! As much as people enjoy the auto-download feature on Telegram, not everyone feels comfortable with the feature. To make it an option, Telegram has settings that allow users to disable auto-downloading and other settings that prevent photos from being saved to your gallery.

To stop auto-downloading of media files:

• Launch your Telegram app by tapping on its icon

• Tap on the three horizontal bars located on the top left side of the launch page

• On the menu that appears, tap Settings

• Under Settings, tap Data and Storage.

• On the Data and Storage page, tap the Automatic media download section

• Here you will have several options. You can disable auto-download when using either mobile data, or Wi-Fi, or both. If you do not want any auto-downloads to happen, disable the toggle buttons next to “When using mobile data” and “When connected on Wi-Fi”

If you have disabled the auto-download feature and still need to prevent any media files that you physically download from being stored in your gallery, you need to disable the “Save to gallery” function.

To disable the save to gallery function on Telegram:

• Navigate to Settings on Telegram

• Find Chat Settings and tap on it

• Under chat settings, scroll to find the Save to gallery option.

• Disable the toggle button next to it.

Once disabled, Telegram will not save downloaded photos to your gallery. Instead, you will only be able to view your images only while on the Telegram app.