Privacy Policy

Effective date: 2026-10-09

This policy explains what the Vacation Photos iPhone app and the Vacation Photos website do with your data. We keep it short and plain.

What stays on your device

  • The app reads your photo library to find photos taken away from home and group them into trips.
  • It uses the date and location stored in each photo. This sorting happens on your iPhone.
  • Your home location, your trip list, your edits and your display name are stored only on your iPhone.
  • The app finds faces in photos on your iPhone to choose good cover photos. Your photos are not sent anywhere for this.
  • If you share a trip, the app shows your contacts so you can pick who to send it to. Your contacts are read on your iPhone and are never uploaded.
  • When you pick a contact, the app opens WhatsApp or Messages with that person's number and the share message. What happens next is handled by WhatsApp or Apple.
  • There are no accounts or sign-ins.
  • Deleting the app removes the data stored on your iPhone. It does not remove trips you have already shared (see "Deleting shared trips").

Place names and searches

  • To turn a photo's location into a place name (like "Lisbon, Portugal"), the app uses Apple's location service. This sends the photo's coordinates to Apple.
  • If you tap "use current location" to set your home, the app reads your current location once and asks Apple for its place name.
  • If you type a place name to search (for example, to set your home or fix a trip's location), the text you type is sent to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service to find matching places.
  • We do not store these searches or coordinates on our own servers.

What is uploaded, and only when you choose to share a trip

Nothing from your photo library is uploaded unless you tap Share on a trip. Sharing needs an iCloud account.

When you share a trip, the app uploads the following to our app's storage in Apple iCloud:

  • Up to 50 photos from that trip. The app makes them smaller (2048 pixels wide) and saves them as new JPEG files.
  • The trip's place name (city, region, country), its start and end dates, and the number of photos.
  • The display name you type for sharing (for example "Sam").

The app does not upload the exact GPS coordinates of your photos as separate data. The shared photos are new copies made by the app.

Who can see a shared trip:

  • Anyone who has the share link can see the trip. Treat the link like the photos themselves: anyone you forward it to can open it.
  • The link itself contains the trip's place name.
  • People who open your link can view the photos and save them to their own phone.

Analytics

In the app (version 1.1.7):

  • We do not run our own analytics in the app.
  • The app does not use advertising identifiers and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites.
  • The app uses Google's ML Kit to detect faces on your device. Google says ML Kit does not send your photos or the results to Google. It does send Google technical data about how ML Kit performs, such as:
    • device model and operating system version
    • app version
    • a random identifier for your app installation
    • timing and error codes
    Google uses this to maintain ML Kit.

On this website and our other Vacation Photos web pages, we use two analytics tools:

  • Google Analytics 4 (by Google). It uses cookies. It collects information such as the pages you view, your browser and device type, an approximate location based on your IP address, and how you arrived. We look at summary reports from it, such as total page views, top pages and traffic sources.
  • SwapAnalytics, our own analytics service. The first time you visit, it saves a random ID in your browser's local storage. This is not a cookie. Each time you open a page, it sends us a record containing:
    • the page address, including anything after "?" in the link
    • the page you came from
    • any campaign (UTM) tags in the link
    • the random ID
    • whether the page was on our live site
    Our server adds the time it was received. The record itself does not include your name, email address, IP address or browser details (see the server logs below, which do). These SwapAnalytics page-view records are deleted automatically 90 days after they are received.

Like any website, the servers that run this website and our analytics service receive your IP address and browser details when you connect. They keep server logs for security and troubleshooting. Each log line contains your full IP address, the time, the page or address requested (including anything after "?"), the page you came from, and your browser's user-agent text. These logs are kept for about two weeks and then deleted.

We also keep daily summary totals imported from Google Analytics and Google Search Console (for example, total page views per day). These totals do not identify individual visitors and are kept without an expiry date.

You can block or clear cookies and local storage in your browser settings. Clearing local storage also resets the SwapAnalytics random ID. You can also use Google's opt-out browser add-on for Google Analytics.

We do not sell your data. We do not show ads, and we do not use your data for advertising.

Third parties and service providers

  • Apple: stores shared trips (iCloud) and turns coordinates into place names. Apple's privacy policy applies.
  • OpenStreetMap Foundation (Nominatim): receives place names you type into search. The OpenStreetMap Foundation's privacy policy applies.
  • Google: receives ML Kit technical data from the app, and Google Analytics data from our website. Google's privacy policy applies.
  • WhatsApp / Apple Messages: receive the message you choose to send.
  • Hosting providers: our website and our analytics service run on a server we rent from DigitalOcean. Our SwapAnalytics records are stored in a managed MongoDB Atlas database. We do not give our analytics records to other companies for their own use.
  • GitHub: our support page links to GitHub Issues, and anything you post there is public. Please do not post share links or personal details there. Email us instead (see "Contact").

Deleting shared trips

  • The app does not yet have a button to delete a shared trip. Shared trips stay stored until we delete them.
  • To have a trip you shared deleted, email swapp19902@gmail.com with the share link (or the trip's place name and dates, and the name you shared it under). We will delete the trip and its photos from our iCloud storage within 14 days.
  • We cannot remove photos that someone has already saved to their own phone.

Children

The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information.

Changes

If this policy changes, we will update this page and the effective date.

Contact

For privacy questions and deletion requests, email swapp19902@gmail.com.

For general help, you can also use our support page at https://vacationphotos.swapp1990.org/support. Posts there are public.