Pic Prune privacy policy

The app

Your photos never leave your phone

Pic Prune finds look-alike photos using Apple's Vision framework, which runs on your iPhone. Your photos are read from your library, compared on the device, and never sent anywhere. There is no server to send them to.

That is not a policy promise you have to take on trust. The app contains no networking code at all: no HTTP requests, no SDK that phones home, nothing. The only thing it talks to is Apple's own services on your behalf, described below.

What we collect about you: nothing

We have no account system, no sign-up, no email list and no analytics in the app. We do not know who you are, how often you open Pic Prune, how many photos you have, or what you deleted. There is no third-party analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDK in the app.

The app's privacy manifest, which Apple publishes on the App Store listing, declares no collected data types and no tracking. That is accurate.

Photo library access

Pic Prune asks for access to your photo library because that is the thing it works on. You can grant full access or pick selected photos, and it works either way: with a selection it simply only sees what you chose. You can change or revoke this at any time in Settings → Apps → Pic Prune → Photos.

Deleting photos always goes through iOS, which means anything cleared lands in your Recently Deleted album for 30 days. We never bypass that.

iCloud, and what actually syncs

If you are signed in to iCloud, Pic Prune keeps a record of your review decisions in your own private iCloud database, so they carry across your devices and survive reinstalling the app. This uses Apple's CloudKit private database, which means it sits in your iCloud account. We cannot read it. We have no access to it, and no way to get access to it.

What that record contains:

Photo identifiers, which are the local and iCloud reference strings iOS uses
Whether you kept or cleared each photo
How many bytes were freed, and when
Which groups you have finished reviewing

What it does not contain: your photos. No image data, no thumbnails, no faces, no locations.

Pic Prune works completely normally when you are signed out of iCloud. You lose the syncing and nothing else.

Notifications

Pic Prune can send three kinds of reminder: one when photographs are waiting in its trash, so the space you cleared is actually recovered; one weekly summary of what a background scan has found; and one in the evening when you have a daily streak running and have not yet made a decision that day. All are optional, you are asked once, and each may be switched off in the app's own settings or in Settings → Apps → Pic Prune → Notifications.

These are local notifications, composed on your iPhone by the app itself. They are not push notifications. Nothing is sent to us, we are not told that one was scheduled, delivered or opened, and no server is involved at any point.

Purchases

Purchases go through Apple's App Store using StoreKit. Apple is the seller, Apple processes the payment, and we never see your payment details. We receive no personal information from a purchase, only whether the current device is entitled to Pro. Refunds are handled by Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

This website

Cookies and analytics on this website

This website sets no cookies at all. We removed Google Analytics on 21 August 2026, and the cookie banner went with it. You are not asked to agree to anything any more because there is no longer anything to agree to.

We do still need to know roughly how many people visit and which guides get read. Cloudflare, who serve the site, count that in two ways, and neither one uses a cookie.

Most of it comes from the web requests they already handle to deliver pages, which gives page views, referrers and an approximate country. It is the same request data described under Hosting below, counted rather than discarded, and nothing about it reaches your device.

Cloudflare also adds a small measurement script to the page as it is served. We do not ship it and it is not in our source; Cloudflare inserts it in transit. It reports how quickly the page loaded and which page it was. It sets no cookie, records no IP address and does not fingerprint your browser, so it cannot recognise you on a second visit or follow you to another site. It is the only script on this site that is not ours.

Pic Prune itself has never had analytics of any kind, and that has not changed. It is the part that touches your photos, and it does not report anything anywhere.

Beyond that the site loads no advertising or social scripts, and nothing that tracks you between sites.

What happens when you tap the App Store button

App Store links on this site go through a redirect at /go/app so we can tell which articles actually help people. When you tap one, we record:

Which page you tapped it from
The referring site, if you arrived from one
Your country, as our host reports it
Whether you are on an iPhone or iPad, or something else

We do not store your IP address, set any identifier, or link these events to each other or to you. It is a count of taps per page, not a profile.

Hosting

The site is hosted by Cloudflare, who process ordinary web-server request data (including IP addresses) to serve pages and block attacks, as any host must. That is Cloudflare acting as our infrastructure provider, and it is covered by their own privacy terms.

General

Children

Pic Prune is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone, so there is no children's data for us to hold.

Your rights

You have rights over personal data held about you, including access, correction and deletion. From the app we hold nothing at all, so there is nothing there to hand over or erase. From this website there is nothing tied to you either: the visit counts are aggregate, and the App Store tap counts carry no identifier. If you believe we hold something about you, write to us and we will look.

The decision records in your own iCloud are yours rather than ours: delete the app's iCloud data in Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage, and it is gone.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it. We are not going to quietly start collecting things.

Who is responsible, and under which law

This policy is governed by the law of Ireland. The mandatory data-protection and consumer rights of the country you live in still apply regardless.

In data-protection terms we are the controller for the almost nothing we hold. The decision records in your own iCloud are held by Apple on your behalf, under your Apple Account, not ours.

Privacy