Privacy Policy

PicSeek is an iPhone app for searching your photo library in natural language. This policy explains how the current version handles your photos and data.

Photos and the search index

PicSeek reads the library you authorize and builds a search index on your device: capture dates, places, scenes and objects recognized by Apple Vision, features produced by the image-understanding models bundled with the app, and text extracted from photos. These models ship inside the app and run on your device without a network connection. The index is stored in the app’s local storage, and so are your recent searches and scan settings. PicSeek does not send your photos or the index to our servers. When photos live in iCloud Photos, Apple’s system services may download the originals so they can be analyzed.

Photo library access

The app needs read access to your library to build the index, and asks for permission to add photos when you use the “Do not scan” feature. You can change or revoke these permissions in iOS Settings at any time. After you revoke access, the index already built stays on your device; clear the index and stop scanning in app Settings, or delete the app to remove it.

While viewing a photo in the app you can also favorite, share or delete it. These actions use the iOS photo permission; deleting always shows Apple’s system confirmation, and deleted photos go to Recently Deleted.

Places

Place-name lookup is off by default. In Settings → Place-name lookup, you can read the disclosure and confirm that you want to enable it. Once enabled, PicSeek uses the location stored in each photo and Apple’s mapping service to turn coordinates into place names, so searches like “in Tokyo” work. You can turn it off at any time without affecting visual or text search. To cut down on lookups, nearby photos share one result. Coordinates are sent to Apple for the lookup and Apple’s privacy policy applies; PicSeek never requests your live location and never sends locations to us.

The “Do not scan” album

Photos you place in the “PicSeek 不掃描” (“PicSeek Do Not Scan”) album that PicSeek creates are skipped and never indexed.

Background processing

To keep indexing when you are not using the app, PicSeek requests background processing tasks from iOS, which determines when they run. This work happens on your device, and you can turn off Background App Refresh in iOS Settings.

Accounts, tracking and third parties

The current version requires no account and has no ads, analytics SDKs or cross-app tracking. The app does not collect your personal data.

In-app purchases

PicSeek’s free tier indexes a limited number of photos; Personal, Plus and Max are yearly auto-renewing subscriptions that raise the indexing limit. Payment, renewal, cancellation and refunds are handled by the Apple App Store. PicSeek reads and verifies your Apple entitlements on the device to unlock the matching limit and never receives card details. Loading prices, purchasing and restoring purchases require connecting to Apple’s services, and Apple’s privacy policy and terms apply.

Retention and removal

Settings → Clear index and stop scanning removes the local index and recent searches, and stops scanning without uninstalling the app. Deleting the app also removes its local index. Photos in your system library and the “Do not scan” album are managed by Photos and are not deleted when you delete the app. iOS device backups and Photos cloud sync are controlled by you and Apple’s settings.

Contact

Questions about how PicSeek handles privacy? Email [email protected]. When you email us, we receive the message and your address and use them to reply. The support website uses the Charonyu site’s traffic statistics and cannot read any photos or index data in PicSeek.