Privacy

Last updated 21 October 2026

Who is responsible

The controller for processing on this site is:

What this site does not do

It sets no cookies. It stores nothing on your device — no local storage, no session storage, no fingerprinting. There are no accounts, no forms and no comment system, so there is nothing here for you to submit. There are no embedded videos, fonts, maps or social widgets loaded from other companies.

If you email us

The Impressum publishes an address, and writing to it is the only way to send anything to us from here — the site itself sends and stores nothing. If you write, your address and what you sent are kept in the mailbox and used to answer you. They are shared with nobody, and a one-line request to the same address deletes them.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — you asked, and answering is the processing.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted by Cloudflare, Inc. (101 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA) on Cloudflare Pages. Serving a page necessarily involves your IP address, the address requested, the time, the referring page and your browser's user-agent string being processed by Cloudflare's servers.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The legitimate interest is delivering the site reliably and protecting it from attack and abuse.

Transfer outside the EU: Cloudflare is a US company and may process data outside the European Economic Area. Transfers are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses and by Cloudflare's certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. A data processing agreement is in place.

The application

This section covers the Frames app on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

Frames sends no telemetry, no crash reports and no usage counts. It does no cloud processing of any kind: nothing about your photographs is sent anywhere to be analysed, scored, described or improved.

Frames syncs your decisions — ratings, verdicts, keywords, captions, creator and copyright details, the recipes and versions describing your developments, saved searches, looks, export presets, star meanings, composition intentions and marked observations, your Frames collections with their folders and order, the albums you hide, the sets you make by hand, and the names of your sources — between your own devices, through your own iCloud account. With it, Frames also syncs the scene analysis behind search: the measurements Apple's Vision framework made of each analysed photograph on one of your devices, and its feature print, a numerical summary used to find similar photographs. Sync is on from the first launch, and the switch that turns it off is in Settings. This is private to your Apple account; it passes through no server of ours and we cannot read it. Your photographs themselves are never uploaded by this.

Nothing asks before sync starts on a new device. Turning sync off affects only the device you turn it off on; turning it on from one device turns it on for your other devices signed in to the same iCloud account. Sync also carries the capture details read from your originals, including the camera body's serial number and recorded GPS coordinates, and the routes you add from GPX, FIT or KML files. Removing a route removes it from every device.

The earliest trial start date syncs through your own iCloud account across your devices, even when sync is off. This carries no photographs or library details and passes through no server of ours.

The catalogue — your verdicts, ratings and recipes — lives in Frames' own container on each of your devices, and in your own iCloud account when syncing is on. It stores what a photograph's EXIF says, which includes the camera body's serial number.

Scene analysis and masking use Apple's Vision framework on the device itself. No photograph leaves the machine to be looked at, by us or by anybody else.

On iPhone and iPad, Frames reads workouts and their routes from Apple Health only when you choose Health Workouts to place photographs that have no location, and the system asks for your permission the first time. Frames reads the workouts around the photographs' capture times and writes nothing to Health. A route you choose from Health stays on that device: it is never synced and never reaches iCloud. A location placed from it becomes the photograph's location in Frames' catalogue, which travels with your other decisions when sync is on, and for a card imported into Photos it is written into the photograph in your Photos library.

Frames reads your Photos library after you allow it. A photograph stored only in iCloud Photos is downloaded from Apple, through Photos, when Frames needs it. On Apple TV, Frames reads the library once you press Show My Photographs, asks Photos for each photograph at 2048 pixels and, for a show, at the size of the screen; Photos fetches them from Apple when the Apple TV does not hold them. Apple TV keeps its previews in the system's caches, changes nothing in the library and only receives sync.

When allowed, Frames writes a full-resolution rendering of a development into the Photos library, and iCloud Photos syncs it to every device on the account. Photos' own Revert to Original undoes it. Frames asks before the first one, and the switch is in Settings › Photographs and in the Photos source panel.

If you turn on Automatically favorite rated photos, a Mac running Frames marks Photos photographs at or above the rating you choose as favorites in the Photos library, and removes only the favorites it added. It needs sync to be on. iCloud Photos carries the favorite to your other devices when that service is enabled.

Widgets, the Top Shelf on Apple TV and Live Activities read a small snapshot Frames keeps on the device, in a container shared with its extensions: counts, the names of collections and small thumbnails. It never leaves the device. Frames asks once before it sends notifications, which report the progress and outcome of a job you started.

With Show photographs in Spotlight on, Frames adds your albums, collections and the photographs you have judged to the device's own Spotlight index. Shortcuts and Siri run Frames' actions on the device.

Frames keeps the crash and hang reports Apple's MetricKit hands it on the device. They leave it only if you save or share the diagnostics report yourself.

Purchase and trial state go through Apple's StoreKit. Frames sees no payment details.

Journey stores recorded GPS coordinates with capture metadata and uses Apple Maps for its basemap. A place Journey gives a photograph without GPS, from photographs taken around the same time, is worked out on your device and never stored. Map requests go to Apple to display the area being explored. Frames does not request your device's current location. Journey's photograph thumbnails use locally cached previews. To name the stops of the day you choose, Journey sends their coordinates to Apple and keeps the names on your device. Turn this off with Show Place Names in Settings.

World draws its globe from Apple Maps' satellite imagery through MapKit, so map requests go to Apple for the area on screen. Its lights are counted on your device from the locations your photographs already hold. World asks Apple for a place name only for the place you select and the place you draw, under the same Show Place Names setting, and keeps the names on your device.

How long anything is kept

Server logs are retained by the host for a short period for security and diagnostics. Nothing else about a visit is recorded.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data held about you (Art. 15)
• have inaccurate data corrected (Art. 16)
• have data erased (Art. 17)
• restrict processing (Art. 18)
• receive your data in a portable form (Art. 20)
• object to processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 21)

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In Germany that is the data protection authority of the federal state in which the controller is established.

Changes

This notice describes the site as it stands on the date above. It will be updated when the site starts doing something new — the beta mail link arrived and left that way, and this page changed in both commits.

See also the Impressum.