What happens to your photos

We ask for photographs of your family so an illustrator can draw them. This page says exactly where they go, how long they exist, and what is left afterwards. If anything here reads as vague, treat that as a fault worth telling us about.

Where they go

Two places, and no others.

• Our server. A single machine we run. The files are written to disk with random names — your filenames are discarded — and are read only by the program that makes your book.
• Google's Gemini models. This is the illustrator. To draw a character that looks like your child, the model has to see your child. The photographs are sent to Google's API, an answer comes back, and no copy stays with them for our account.

They are not published, not shared, not shown to other customers, and not looked at by us as a matter of course. There is no third-party analytics, no advertising network, and no content delivery network on this site — nothing on the page is loaded from anywhere but our own machine.

When they are deleted

• The moment you approve your characters. That is the button that deletes them. Until you press it we keep them, because redrawing a character means looking at the photograph again — that is the whole reason you get two attempts.
• Sooner, if you chose “just make it”. With no stops there is nothing to approve, so they are deleted as soon as the characters are drawn.
• Within about a day, if you walk away. If you upload photographs and then close the tab without approving anything, nothing deletes them at that instant — we cannot tell a closed tab from a long pause. A sweep removes the photographs of any abandoned book roughly a day after the last thing you did. This is the one case where "immediately" would be untrue, so we are not saying it.

What is kept, and for how long

• The book: 14 days. Then the PDF, the pictures and everything used to make them are deleted. The date is printed on your download screen.
• The drawings, not the photographs. Once your characters are approved what remains is drawn artwork. Your photographs are never printed in the book — the program that lays out the PDF cannot reach them.
• Your answers, on your own device only. The questionnaire is saved in your browser so you can order a second book without typing it again. It never goes to a profile on our server, and it holds no photographs — only the drawings and the text you wrote. Clearing it is a button on the “Your books” screen, and it is the only copy, so clearing it really does remove it.
• Two cookies, for twelve hours. One holds your access code so you are not asked for it on every screen; the other records that the code was accepted. They are not readable by scripts and they are not used to follow you anywhere.
• A web-server log. Like any web server, ours records requests. That log includes the address you connected from. It is kept on the machine, rotated, and not sent anywhere. We would rather say this than claim "no tracking" and be approximately right.

What we never ask for

No account. No email address. No password. No payment details on this site. Your access code is the only thing that identifies you to us, and your download code is the only way back to a finished book — which is why the screen tells you to write it down. We cannot recover a lost download code, because we store only a one-way hash of it and genuinely cannot read it.

Children

This is a product for a parent to buy for their child. Please upload photographs only of people in your own family, and only if you are entitled to. We have no way to verify that and are relying on you.

Last updated when the illustrator disclosure above was added. If a sentence on this page ever disagrees with what the software does, the software is what is wrong and we want to know.