Privacy policy

Who this policy is from

Photo Cleanup helps you find duplicates, blurry shots, screenshots and large videos in your photo library, and delete or sort them. It is published by Lucija Tatarević. In this policy, “the app” means the Photo Cleanup iPhone app and “we” means the publisher.

This policy covers the app itself. It doesn’t cover the App Store, iCloud or anything else Apple operates — those are governed by Apple’s own privacy policy.

What we collect

Nothing. The app has no backend. It does not create an account for you, does not ask for your name or email address, and does not send us usage data, crash reports, device identifiers or advertising identifiers.

There is no analytics SDK in the app. There is no tracking. There are no cookies, because there is no website component that reads them and no server to send them to.

There is no data for us to collect, sell, share or lose, because none of it reaches us. In Apple’s App Store privacy terms the app is declared as Data Not Collected.

What the app can access

The app requests exactly one permission: access to your photo library, for reading it and for making the deletions and album changes you confirm. iOS asks for it in these words:

“Photo Cleanup analyzes your photos on this iPhone to find duplicates, blurry shots, screenshots, and large videos, and to sort photos into albums. Nothing is uploaded and no account is required.”

It never asks for contacts, location, notifications, tracking, the microphone, the camera, your calendar, or anything else. You can change or revoke photo access at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos.

If you grant Limited Access and pick only some photos, the app analyses only the photos you picked and says so in its results, rather than pretending it has seen your whole library. It offers you the system picker or Settings if you want to widen the selection.

Photos in your Hidden album are excluded entirely — never indexed, never analysed, never shown.

If you deny access altogether, the app still opens and can be explored using built-in demo photos.

Where the analysis happens

All of it happens on your iPhone, inside the app, using Apple’s own on-device frameworks. That includes:

• Duplicate and near-duplicate detection, using Vision feature prints
• Blur and sharpness scoring, from Laplacian variance
• Screenshot, video and file-size detection
• Grouping similar photos together

No photo, thumbnail, feature print, filename or identifier is uploaded for analysis. There is no cloud component to upload it to.

What is stored on your device

The app keeps a small amount of working data on the iPhone itself, so it doesn’t have to re-analyse your library every time you open it:

• Analysis records — for each photo: a blur score, a Vision feature print, the measured file size, and which version of the analysis produced them, stored against Apple’s internal photo identifier.
• Similarity groups — which photos were found to resemble each other, and how confident the match was.
• Scan progress — so an interrupted scan can resume where it stopped.
• Thumbnail cache — small previews, capped in size and automatically purgeable by iOS.
• Your decisions and preferences — what you chose to keep, delete or sort, your session history, your settings, and whether the one-time unlock is active.

All of it lives inside the app’s own storage on your device. None of it is backed by a server. Deleting the app removes all of it.

Clearing what the app stored

You can clear that working data without deleting the app: Settings → Erase local analysis data. It erases the analysis records, the thumbnail cache, your decision history and the scan state. It never touches your actual photos or albums.

When the app causes network activity

The app itself makes no network requests and contains no upload path. Two things can still cause traffic, and both are performed by Apple rather than by the app:

• iCloud photo downloads. If your library is stored in iCloud and you turn on Analyze iCloud photos — which is off by default — Apple’s Photos framework downloads full-resolution copies from your own iCloud account so they can be analysed on the device. This is your iCloud account talking to Apple, exactly as it does in the Photos app. It may use mobile data.
• The App Store. Buying or restoring the one-time unlock is handled by Apple’s payment system.

Neither route sends anything to us.

Deleting photos

The app never deletes anything on its own. Photos you mark for deletion collect in a queue that you review, with its exact count and size. When you confirm, iOS shows its own separate confirmation and Apple’s Photos framework performs the deletion — the app only requests it, then checks the result against your live library and reports only what actually happened.

Deleted photos go to Recently Deleted in the Photos app and stay recoverable there for up to 30 days, as with any deletion on iOS. That recovery window is controlled by iOS, not by us.

Payment

The app is free to use, with a one-time purchase that removes a limit on how many deletions you can commit. The purchase is handled entirely by Apple through the App Store using Apple’s own payment system, and verified on your device by StoreKit.

We never see your name, your email address, your payment details or your billing address. The app stores only whether the unlock is active and the displayed price. No receipts or identifiers are sent anywhere by the app. Refunds and billing are handled by Apple under Apple’s own policies.

Third parties

There are none. The app contains no analytics, advertising, attribution, crash-reporting or tracking components, and no third-party accounts, logins or services. Its dependency tree contains none of them and it emits no telemetry.

Apple is not a third party in the usual sense here — it is the platform. Your use of iCloud and the App Store is governed by Apple’s own privacy policy.

Your rights under the GDPR

The publisher is based in Germany, so the GDPR applies. Under it you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, port and object to the processing of your personal data.

In practice there is nothing to exercise those rights against, because we hold no personal data about you: no account, no email address, no identifier, no usage record. Any data the app creates lives only on your own device, under your own control, and you can erase it at any time from Settings or by deleting the app.

If you believe personal data has been processed unlawfully, you may complain to a supervisory authority in your country of residence.

Children

The app is not directed to children under 16 and does not knowingly process any data about them. Since it collects no data from anyone, this holds regardless of who is using it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version is published on this page with a new date. The version shown inside the app is the version that shipped with the copy of the app you installed; updating the app updates it.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything above: cistern_scooter.8r@icloud.com.