How PicWay handles your photos
- PicWay browses, analyzes, compresses, organizes, and deletes your photos and videos on your iPhone. PicWay has no server that receives your photos.
- Your photos and videos leave this phone in only one case: the Private Vault’s iCloud sync (on by default). Items are encrypted and stored in your own iCloud, and only you can open them.
- Review everything in Set Aside, then confirm with iOS before deleting.
- PicWay has no accounts, ads, behavioral tracking or third-party SDKs.
- iOS crash and hang reports stay on this device and aren’t sent to the developer automatically.
Your photos and videos aren’t uploaded to us
PicWay browses, analyzes, compresses, organizes, and deletes your photos and videos on this device only. PicWay has no server that receives your photos. Your photos and videos leave this phone in only one case: the Private Vault’s iCloud sync (on by default), explained below.
Before anything is deleted, you review it first, then iOS asks you to confirm.
No sign-up, no ads, no tracking
Just open it and start. PicWay has no accounts, ads, or behavior tracking, and no third-party SDKs.
Diagnostics stay on your phone
iOS crash and hang reports stay on this device and aren’t sent to the developer automatically.
If you tap Send feedback to email us, the email includes the app version, iOS version, and an anonymous ID to help us find the problem. It doesn’t include photos, file names, or locations.
Only the Private Vault goes to your own iCloud
Your photos and videos leave this phone in just one case: you put them in the Private Vault and its iCloud sync is on (it’s on by default).
They’re encrypted on your phone first, then stored in your own iCloud. Only you can open them, and you can get them back on a new phone or after reinstalling. You can turn this off in the vault’s settings. New changes then stay on this phone, and what’s already in iCloud isn’t deleted.
When PicWay uses the internet
Only in these cases:
- When the original is in iCloud and not on your phone, and you view it, compress it, or move it to the Private Vault. The original has to download first.
- When Precise Places is on, to turn a photo’s coordinates into a place name.
- When you open the details of a photo that has a location, the small map is drawn by Apple Maps from the photo’s coordinates.
- To sync your stats and Moments, and for the Private Vault’s iCloud sync.
- When you tap Send feedback in PicWay’s settings to send an email.
Location: only the coordinates saved with your photos
PicWay never uses your device location. It only reads the coordinates stored in your photos to group them by place.
With Precise Places on, photo coordinates go to Apple’s geocoding service to get place names: street or nearby-place names in mainland China, and city names elsewhere. Apple’s mapping partners may provide this service, and PicWay has no server that receives these coordinates.
While you have PicWay open, it also fills in places that haven’t been resolved to street level yet, in small batches. It sends that service one location merged from nearby photos, not each photo’s own coordinates, with at most 120 requests per round and a 2-second pause between requests. It doesn’t do this while you’re not using your phone.
The place names stay on this device, for search and the map. Turning off Precise Places or narrowing photo access clears them immediately.
Precise Places is on by default. To turn it off, open Photos & iCloud in PicWay’s settings and turn off Precise Places. This clears every place name found so far and keeps only the built-in offline list.
Outside the Private Vault, only numbers and records sync
Your days with PicWay, photos revisited, space freed, and review activity sync automatically between devices signed in to the same Apple Account, along with the dates, names, and status in Moments. Apart from the Private Vault’s own iCloud sync, only these numbers and records sync, not your photos, videos, or thumbnails.
This website’s launch email list
This section is about this website, not the app. If you sign up on the launch email page to hear when PicWay is on the App Store, we keep:
- your email address
- the language of the page, when you signed up, and which page of this site you used
- which version of the note next to the form you saw
We don’t keep your IP address.
We use your address only to send one email when PicWay is on the App Store. We don’t share the list with anyone or use it for ads. The list is stored with Cloudflare, which hosts this website and processes the list for us. After the launch email goes out, we delete the whole list within 30 days.
To remove your address before then, enter it on the launch email page and tap Remove me from the list. It’s deleted right away. Signing up doesn’t create an account. The PicWay app itself has no accounts.