Privacy policy

Your photo library never leaves your Mac

Everything Zouti Photos does — reading metadata, searching, finding duplicates, scoring, editing, exporting — happens on your own computer, using your own processor. Your photos, videos, faces, locations, keywords, captions, album names, file paths, and the AI labels Apple generated on your device are read locally and stay locally.

We don't run a server for Zouti Photos, and the app has no account to sign in to. There is nowhere for your library to be uploaded, and no copy of it for us to lose, subpoena, or be breached out of. Files only ever leave the app when you export them, to a folder you choose.

Changes to your library — editing metadata, adding to an album, setting a favorite, deleting — go through Apple's supported Photos interface, so macOS stays in charge of your library and its own permission prompts.

Anonymous usage data

Today, Zouti Photos collects no usage data at all. It doesn't phone home.

We may add basic usage analytics in a future version, because knowing which features people actually use helps us decide what to improve and what to retire. If we do, we're committing in advance to these rules:

• You choose. You can turn it off at any time in Settings.
• Aggregate counts only. Things like "the export panel was opened" or "a similarity search was run" — plus the app version and macOS version, so we know which releases to support.
• Never anything from your library. No filenames, photo content, thumbnails, dates, locations, people, keywords, captions, album names, search terms, template strings, or counts of your photos. Nothing that describes your library or a photo in it.
• Not tied to you. No name, no email, no account, no advertising identifier, no device serial number, and no cross-app tracking. Reports are pooled across everyone so we see totals, not individuals.

If we ever want to collect something beyond that, we'll update this page and ask you first. We won't quietly widen the scope.

Your email address

There are exactly two ways we end up with your email address, and both start with you:

• You wrote to us. Support email lives in an ordinary mailbox. We keep the thread so we can follow up and recognize you next time, and we delete it on request. Please don't send us photos or library files unless we ask for something specific to diagnose a bug — and if you do, we delete them once the bug is fixed.
• You joined the mailing list. It's used for release announcements and occasional news Zouti tools — nothing else, and never daily. Every message has a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing removes you from the list.

Those lists are stored with the email provider we use to send them, which processes the addresses on our behalf and isn't allowed to use them for anything else. We don't upload your address to advertising platforms, we don't run "lookalike audience" matching, and we don't trade lists with anyone.

Purchases and trials

Zouti Photos is sold through the Mac App Store. Apple handles the entire transaction: we never see your card number, billing address, or Apple Account. Apple gives developers aggregate sales and territory reports, which tell us how many copies sold in a country — not who bought them. Apple's handling of that purchase is covered by Apple's privacy policy.

The free trial downloaded directly from this site requires no account and no email address. It's a notarized build that runs entirely offline apart from checking whether a newer version exists.

This website

zouti.app is a static site hosted on Cloudflare Pages. It sets no cookies, loads no third-party fonts or scripts, and carries no analytics, ad pixels, or social trackers. There's no consent banner here because there's nothing to consent to.

Our host keeps standard server logs (IP address, timestamp, page requested, browser) for a short period to serve the site and block abuse. We don't build profiles from them, and we don't combine them with anything else.

AI assistants and the MCP server

Zouti Photos includes an optional MCP server so you can connect an AI assistant to your library. It's off until you turn it on, it listens only on your own machine, and it's protected by a token you can rotate at any time. Separate switches control what an assistant may see, and everything except basic metadata starts off.

One honest caveat: if you connect an assistant that runs in the cloud, then whatever you ask it about your library is sent to that company under their privacy policy — not ours. That's your call to make, which is why the feature is opt-in, granular, and logs every request for you to review. The data still never comes to us.

What we will never do

• We will never sell your information. Not your email address, not usage data, not anything else — to anyone, at any price. We also don't "share" it in the sense advertisers use that word: no rental, no barter, no data brokers, no ad targeting.
• We will never look inside your photo library or use it to train anything.
• We will never add tracking SDKs or advertising to our apps.
• We will never make you create an account to use software you bought.

The only time we'd hand anything over is if the law genuinely required it — and in that case, what we hold is an email address, because nothing from your library was ever ours to give.

If Zouti is ever sold

Small software companies sometimes change hands. If Zouti Photos or the business behind it is ever sold, merged, or transferred, the customer information we hold — essentially the mailing list and support correspondence — would transfer with it, because that's what keeps your app supported and your updates arriving. That's the whole of it, and it's a transfer, not a sale of your data to a third party.

Our commitments in that situation: any buyer would be required to honor this policy for information collected before the sale, we'd announce the change here and on the mailing list before it takes effect, and you can unsubscribe or ask us to delete your information at any point — including after an announcement and before a handover.

Your choices

Wherever you live, you can email us to ask what we hold about you, get a copy of it, have it corrected, or have it deleted. We'll do it — no forms, no arguing. Because we collect so little, the honest answer is usually "your email address and a support thread," and deletion takes us a minute.

Depending on where you live you may have formal rights under laws like the GDPR or the CCPA, including the right not to have your personal information sold. We don't sell it to anyone, so there's nothing to opt out of — but the rest of those rights are yours, and the address below is how to use them.

Our apps aren't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes and how to reach us

If this policy changes, we'll update the date at the top of the page. For anything that meaningfully expands what we collect — such as turning on the usage analytics described above — we'll say so in the app or on the mailing list rather than hoping you re-read this page.

Questions, corrections, or a deletion request? Write to support@zouti.app. A person reads it.

Zouti Technologies LLC · osxphotos is free, open-source software that runs entirely on your own machine and collects nothing; this policy covers it too.