Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated 16 August 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;
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:

Cloud Pass (optional): if you turn this on, Piqt uses Apple's PhotoKit to bulk-fetch iCloud-only photos, over Wi-Fi by default, so they can be scored. This is 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.
Opening a cloud-only photo or video: if you tap directly into a photo or video that hasn't finished downloading, Piqt asks PhotoKit to fetch it right then, which may use cellular. This is a direct response to your own tap, the same way Apple's own Photos app behaves, and is separate from the Wi-Fi-gated bulk Cloud Pass above.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.