Photos stay on your device.

The short version

• Zeglow analyzes your photos on your device. This version sends no photo, description or result to us or to anyone else.
• There is no account, no sign-in, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party analytics or telemetry.
• Zeglow works on your Apple Photos library in place. It never copies your library or exports your photos.
• It changes nothing in Photos until you confirm: keywords are only ever added, and photos are deleted only after you confirm and Photos asks you too.

What Zeglow reads

With the access you grant through Apple’s Photos permission (all photos, or only the ones you choose), Zeglow reads your photos and what Photos already knows about them: dates, locations, albums, favorites, ratings, keywords, captions and whether a photo is a screenshot, a Live Photo or shared. You can change that access at any time in the Settings app; Zeglow stops reading what it can no longer see and removes what it had learned about it.

Place names come from a list of places bundled with the app and looked up on the device, so your locations are never sent anywhere to be named.

What Zeglow keeps, and where

Zeglow keeps its own notes in a private database inside the app on your device:

• an index of your library, so it opens quickly and can search;
• what it learned from looking at photos, such as which shots look alike;
• your rules, categories and settings, your decisions (Keep, Set aside, Skip) and the Tray;
• a record of every change it makes in Photos, written before the change, so an interruption can never leave one half done or repeat it;
• your recent searches;
• small previews of photos, and the images your widgets show, which are stored in a space shared only with Zeglow’s own widgets.

The database, previews and widget images are protected by your device’s passcode and left out of iCloud and device backups. Your recent searches and display preferences are kept with the app’s settings, which iOS includes in backups as it does for every app. Nothing is synced between devices, and everything stays until you delete it.

What Zeglow changes in Photos

• Keywords. When you add keywords, Zeglow writes them into Photos itself, after showing you what it will write. It never removes or rewrites a keyword, caption or rating you wrote.
• Favorites. The heart in the viewer marks or unmarks a photo as a favorite in Photos, as Photos’ own heart does.
• Deletion. Photos you set aside wait in the Tray. They’re deleted only when you open the Tray and confirm; Photos then asks you as well and keeps them in Recently Deleted, where you can still recover them. Zeglow never deletes anything on its own.

What leaves your device

Nothing is sent to the people who make Zeglow, and Zeglow has no server. A few things go through Apple’s own services, as they do in Apple’s apps:

• Maps. The Places map is drawn by Apple Maps, which receives the area of the map you’re looking at in order to draw it, not your photos.
• iCloud Photos. If you use iCloud Photos and a photo is stored only in iCloud, Photos may download it from your iCloud account when you open it. Zeglow fetches such photos in the background only if you turn on Fetch from iCloud for Similar shots, and then at a small size, on Wi‑Fi.
• Widgets. Your widgets and their images are rendered on the device by iOS.

If a future version offers analysis in the cloud, it will be off by default. Before anything leaves your device it will ask you, say what would be sent and to whom, and offer the on-device alternative, and this policy will be updated first.

Notifications

If you allow them, notifications only report the outcome of a task you started: done, needs attention, or couldn’t finish. They carry no photos, and Zeglow never sends reminders to bring you back.

Deleting your data

Settings → Delete App Data erases everything Zeglow keeps: its index, what it learned, your history, recent searches and widget images. Your photos, albums and keywords in Photos stay exactly as they are. Deleting the app removes its data too.

This website

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from other sites. It is a set of static pages.

Children

Zeglow collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the new version will be published here with a new effective date, and the history of every change is public in the project’s repository. Questions are welcome on the support page.