Where your photos actually go
The honest version, including the bits most companies leave out.
When you upload family photos to a website, a fair question is: where do they go, and for how long? Most of the time the answer is hard to find, and when you do find it, it's written to reassure rather than to inform.
Here's ours, in plain English.
While you're making your book, your photos don't come to us at all. They stay on your own device, in your browser's storage, and the whole editor runs there. You can add photos, lay out pages, change your mind, and close the tab, and nothing has been sent anywhere. There's no account, so there's nothing for us to attach your photos to, and no library of your pictures quietly building up on our servers.
That changes at one moment, and we tell you when it happens: when you place your order. To print a book and post it to you, we do need the photos and your address, so at that point your finished book is uploaded to us. We're honest about the next part too, because it's the bit companies tend to skip: a person here may look at your book, to check it printed correctly and to put right anything that has gone wrong. We'd rather say that plainly than imply no human is ever involved.
Then we delete it. Thirty days after you order, your book, your photos, your name, your address and your email address are gone. Not archived, not "kept for support reasons", gone. After that window we couldn't find your order if we tried, which is by design. The only thing we keep is the bare accounting record the law requires: an order number, a date, an amount. No photos, no names, no addresses.
Alongside that, we set no tracking and show no cookie banner, because there's nothing to consent to. We count page visits per day, and nothing about who you are. We're not building a picture of you, because we're not collecting the thing you'd build one from.
None of this is us being heroic. It's what happens when you decide, early on, to hold as little as you can for as short a time as you can, and to be honest about the parts you can't avoid. Your photos are yours. To print them we only need to hold on to them for a few weeks.
The full detail, including the companies that help us print and post, is on our privacy page.