Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated 10 October 2026

Piqt's product principle is that your photos never leave your device. This policy explains what that means in practice, the handful of places Piqt does touch the network, and what little information we handle.

The short version

Piqt performs all photo analysis (scoring, duplicate detection, sorting, etc.) locally on your iPhone using on-device models. No photo, image, face, location, or filename data ever leaves your device, ever. There is no Piqt account, and using the app does not require you to give us any personal information.

Photo library access

To do its job, Piqt asks your permission to access your photo library through Apple's PhotoKit framework. This access stays on your device and is used only to:

Read your photos so they can be scored and grouped on-device;
Mark photos as favorites when you choose to;
Save a trip or moment you've curated as a regular Photos album. Piqt finds an existing album with the same title or creates it, and adds to it. It never removes photos from albums, and the album stays yours to rename or delete in Photos;
Add photos you've cleared to a single "Piqt: To Delete" album so you can complete deletion yourself in Apple's Photos app;
Save a video trim you've reviewed and approved, applied as a non-destructive edit you can revert at any time from Photos.

Piqt never deletes photos directly. You remain in control of every change to your library, and you can revoke photo access at any time in your iOS Settings.

Location and place names

Piqt reads a photo's embedded GPS coordinates to power one scoring signal, how rarely you shoot in that place, and to show a place name on the photo detail card. Piqt never stores your raw coordinates. It keeps only an integer rarity count and a one-way salted hash that cannot be reversed back to a location. Place names are resolved from a gazetteer bundled inside the app; Piqt never makes a live reverse-geocoding call to look up where a photo was taken.

The places Piqt touches the network

Piqt uses the network in a small, purpose-specific set of places, and none of them ever transmits your photos, image data, or personal information:

Photos and Videos on iCloud: if a photo or video is stored only in iCloud, Piqt downloads it through Apple's PhotoKit when it's needed. Opening one directly downloads it right away, the same way Photos itself behaves, which may use cellular. Turning on the optional Cloud Pass gets ahead of that instead, downloading iCloud-only photos in a Wi-Fi-gated bulk pass so they're already there before you ask. Either way, it's a download from your own iCloud library, mediated entirely by Apple. Piqt never sees or stores your iCloud credentials, and no photo data is sent anywhere else.
The feedback board: Settings and the Founders screen offer an in-app feature-request and roadmap board, open to every user, built on a third-party service called WishKit. Piqt sends WishKit a one-way hashed (i.e. scrambled) version of your App Store purchase record, never your email address or name, plus whatever you choose to write or vote on. See "Feedback board (WishKit)" below for the details.
Anonymous usage counts: Piqt records anonymous, session-scoped interaction counts (which screens get used, how often) via TelemetryDeck, to help us find bugs and prioritize features. This is on by default and off in one tap in Settings. It never includes your photos, filenames, or any content from your library, and it isn't tied to an identity. It also covers whether Piqt asked for an App Store rating and whether a Piqt link opened the app, both described below.
In-app purchases: unlocking Piqt Plus goes through Apple's StoreKit. Piqt never sees your payment details, runs no purchase server, stores no account, and creates no user identifier. No photo, image, or library data is involved in a purchase in any way.

Feedback board (WishKit)

The feature request board in Settings and the Founders screen is the one place in Piqt where something you type gets sent to someone other than you, so here's exactly what that involves and how we've limited it.

Your identity there is a salted and hashed ID, not your Apple ID. Piqt takes your App Store purchase record and a fixed value built into the app, runs it through a one-way scrambling function, and sends WishKit only the result. WishKit never receives your email address, your name, or any other personal detail. The same scrambled ID shows up on every device signed into your Apple Account, so your posts and votes stay consistent, but it can't be turned back into your Apple ID by WishKit or by reading Piqt's own code, which is open about exactly how the ID is derived.
Nothing is sent until you open the board. Launching Piqt doesn't tell WishKit anything. The scrambled ID is only sent the moment you tap into the feedback board.
The board is public. What you post, and your votes, are visible to anyone who can view the board, the same as any public feedback forum. Avoid writing anything in a request or comment you wouldn't want public. If you'd rather reach us privately, email privacy@piqt.app instead.
A Founder badge shown there is self-reported by your device, not independently verified by WishKit. It only ever affects how a post is badged on the board, never anything else in the app.
Removing something you posted. There's no delete button on the board yet. Email privacy@piqt.app with the short ID shown next to "Board identity" in Settings or the Founders screen, and we'll have it removed from WishKit on your behalf.

Data stored on your device

Scores, decisions, and related bookkeeping are cached locally on your device so the app doesn't have to re-analyze your library every time. For screenshots and documents, Piqt also stores scrubbed on-screen text (with anything like passwords, card numbers, or codes redacted before it's ever saved) and a semantic image embedding, a numeric fingerprint of the photo's content, so you can find them later. This data lives only on your iPhone and is removed when you delete the app.

Notifications

Piqt can show a weekly status nudge, a same-day "great photo" alert and a "new trip" alert when you get back from a trip. All three are scheduled on your device by Apple's local notification system. There is no push server and nothing is transmitted. Notification text is generic and count-only: it never includes a photo's text, a location, or other content derived from your library, and the trip alert never names the place. Each type has its own toggle in Settings, and the system permission prompt only appears the first time a notification is about to be scheduled, never at first launch.

Identifiers kept on your device

Photos and iCloud identifiers: for each photo, Piqt stores the identifier Apple assigns it on this device and, when you use iCloud Photos, its PHCloudIdentifier, an opaque string Apple assigns for iCloud Photos. The cloud identifier is used only on your device, to re-match your scores, events and decisions to your photos after you restore onto a new phone, where the on-device identifiers change. It is never transmitted.
Free favorites record: the first batch of favorites is free. To remember that it was used, Piqt keeps a tiny this-device-only Keychain record holding two counters: whether the batch was committed, and how many single "Favorite now" taps it covered. It holds no photo identifiers and never leaves your device.
Place hash secret: a random secret generated on your device and kept in the Keychain as this-device-only, used to turn a matched place into a one-way hash. It is never transmitted and does not restore onto another device.

Asking for an App Store rating

After you finish a task, such as clearing a set of duplicates, Piqt may ask you to rate it on the App Store using Apple's standard rating prompt. Apple controls whether and when that prompt appears. Piqt records only which kind of finished task led to the ask, as an anonymous usage count. Nothing about your library goes with it.

Piqt links

Piqt responds to piqt:// links, such as the one on an App Store event, by opening the app to your lens. Opening a link sends nothing to us beyond an anonymous usage count that a Piqt link opened the lens, which never includes the link itself.

Photo and video storage

Piqt does not store any photos or videos in the app itself. Instead, Piqt reads and analyzes photos and videos stored in Apple's Photos library. All privacy and security policies here apply to Piqt's data and Piqt's management of photo scores and metadata. Piqt does not remove, anonymize, or obfuscate the images in other apps, such as Photos.

Acknowledgements

Piqt's on-device scoring builds on research and public data made by others. In the same spirit of transparency as the rest of this page, here's what's underneath the hood:

Place names: the offline gazetteer bundled with Piqt uses data from GeoNames, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Aesthetic scoring: one of Piqt's five scoring signals is a NIMA model, based on Talebi & Milanfar, "NIMA: Neural Image Assessment" (2018), using weights trained by idealo, licensed under Apache 2.0.
Scene and screenshot understanding: Collections and content tagging use a CLIP image-text model, based on Radford et al., "Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision" (2021), using weights trained by LAION, licensed under MIT.
On-device vision: face detection, aesthetics, and image analysis use Apple's Core ML and Vision frameworks.
Anonymous usage counts: Piqt records anonymous, session-scoped interaction counts (which screens get used, how often) via TelemetryDeck, to help us find bugs and prioritize features. This is on by default and off in one tap in Settings. TelemetryDeck does not collect IP addresses, cookies, or any persistent identifier tied to your device. Piqt goes further than TelemetryDeck's own default: each app session gets its own anonymous ID that's discarded when the session ends, so usage from one visit can't be linked to another. It never includes your photos, filenames, or any content from your library.
Feedback board: the in-app feature request and roadmap board runs on WishKit. See "Feedback board (WishKit)" above for what it receives and how your identity there is protected.

Diagnostics

If you choose to share diagnostic information with us, for example, through Apple's TestFlight or by emailing us about a problem, that information may include basic device and crash details. It never includes your photos. Apple's TestFlight is governed by Apple's own privacy terms.

Children's privacy

Piqt is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the app evolves. When we do, we'll revise the "last updated" date above and, for material changes, note them within the app or on this page.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email us at privacy@piqt.app.