What happens to your photo

This is the plain-language version of what happens to the photograph you send. The privacy policy is the formal one; where they differ, the formal one governs - but they should not differ, and if they do, tell us.

Before it leaves your phone

Your browser opens the photograph, turns it into a JPEG and shrinks it. Two things happen in that step that are worth knowing.

Your photograph is prepared here, on your device, whatever format it is in. The browser reads it, drops its metadata and hands over a plain photograph; some formats neither our server nor the furnishing service can read at all, so the work has to happen on your side either way.

The camera data is removed here too, and never reaches us. A phone photograph carries the coordinates of where it was taken - usually somebody's home - along with the date and the model of phone. What we receive is a picture and nothing else. We are not deleting that data carefully; we never have it.

On our server

The prepared photograph is written to a folder named by a long random string, kept for 7 days, and then deleted along with everything made from it. The address of that folder cannot be guessed or counted up to from somebody else's.

We keep the photograph rather than throwing it away immediately so that a failed room can be run again without you finding and uploading it a second time, and so that you can hold each version up against your original while you choose.

Where it goes

Once per room to fal.ai, a company in the United States, which is where the furnishing is done. One request carries your photograph and asks for all 4 versions at once - the picture travels inside the request rather than as a link, so it is never sitting at an address anybody could visit.

fal's own privacy policy says it collects the content sent to it. It links to a page describing how long inputs and outputs are kept - and at the time of writing that page could not be reached. So we cannot tell you how long your photograph exists on their side, and we are not going to guess. This is being chased.

What we do not do with it

We do not show it to anybody else, use it as an example, publish it, or train anything on it. Nobody at legal name looks at your photographs as a matter of course - only if you write to us about one and ask us to.

Why this leaves Europe at all

The furnishing is done by a company in the United States because that is where the machine that does it well lives. We would rather it were closer, and if an equal one appears inside Europe we will move.

Sending personal data out of the European Economic Area needs a safeguard the law recognises. A photograph of a room is very often personal data - it is somebody's home, and it can show what they own and how they live. The privacy policy says where that stands, honestly, including the part still unfinished.

If you would rather it did not

Then this service is not for you, and we would rather say so than take your money and hope you do not mind. There is no way to use it without the photograph going to the furnishing service: that step is the service.

You can, of course, close your account at any time and everything goes with it.

What comes back

The 4 files are yours. Use them anywhere, sell what they show, no credit needed. We claim nothing over them.