PhotoPop privacy policy

Last updated: August 5, 2026

PhotoPop doesn't collect or transmit any personal data. No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts. Everything — browsing, searching, importing, exporting, and editing — happens on your Mac, against your own Photos library. Your photos never leave your device.

What PhotoPop does on your machine

Reads your Photos library, with your permission. PhotoPop uses Apple's PhotoKit to show your albums and photos. macOS asks you to grant access the first time; you can change it any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos. Your library stays on your Mac.
Builds a local search index on-device. To let you search by content, PhotoPop runs Apple's Vision framework over your images to recognize scene labels and any text (OCR), and caches the results in a small file in its Application Support folder. This runs entirely on your Mac; no image, label, or recognized text is ever sent anywhere.
Imports, exports, and edits locally. Dragging photos out writes temporary copies on your Mac; dropping images in adds them to your library; rotating or opening a photo in an external editor and saving writes the change back to your library as a non-destructive edit. All of this stays on your device.
Stores your preferences — small settings such as your sort choice and hotkey — in your local UserDefaults. They never leave your device.

Network connections PhotoPop makes on its own

The Mac App Store build makes no network connections of its own. The direct-download build makes one, only in that build:

Update checks. The Sparkle framework periodically fetches https://bendansby.com/apps/photopop/appcast.xml to see if a newer version is available. The request carries only a User-Agent string and the current PhotoPop version — no identifiers, no telemetry, no tracking.

What we don't do

No analytics or telemetry of any kind.
No user accounts, login, or remote configuration.
No advertising, third-party tracking SDKs, or fingerprinting.
No cookies, no server-side logs about you.
No uploading of your photos — they never leave your Mac.

Contact

ben.dansby@gmail.com

Changes

If anything material changes about what PhotoPop collects, this page updates and the next version's release notes call it out explicitly.