Privacy
- Effective from: 17 October 2026
- Publisher of the app: Dennis Siersma
Albarium works with your photos, which is about as personal as it gets. That is why the app itself sends nothing of yours anywhere: what it keeps, it keeps on your iPhone. This page says what the app does with your data, and what it does not do.
In short
- No account. There is nothing to sign up for.
- No analytics, no advertising, no tracking.
- No server of our own. The app itself does not connect to the internet.
- What the app keeps about your albums and photos, it keeps on your iPhone. Rewind and your settings are included in a backup of your iPhone, though, if your iPhone makes one (see below).
- The app sends the publisher nothing. What the publisher can receive comes through Apple, as Apple arranges it, or from you, if you email (see below).
What the app reads
If you give the app full access to Photos, it reads:
- from your albums and folders: the names, the structure, the order, which photos are in which album, when an album was last changed, and how many photos an album holds according to an estimate by iOS;
- from your photos and videos, including photos in shared albums you take part in (these can be photos by other people): the date, the location if it is stored in the photo, whether it is a photo or a video, whether it is a screenshot or a favourite, and the dimensions;
- from Photos itself: a change token, so that next time the app only needs to read what changed in your library since then, and the history of changes in your library: the IDs of photos, albums and folders that were added, changed or deleted since then;
- just before every action on your albums: the iCloud ID of every visible photo in your own albums (the albums the app can change), if Photos provides one, for the snapshot (see below). The app does not read the iCloud ID of hidden photos, or of photos that are only in shared or synced albums;
- in the workbench: the photos you are reviewing, scaled down to about 512 pixels, to compare them on your iPhone with the image model of iOS, and for each photo when it was last changed, so the app can tell whether anything about the photo has changed since, such as an edit. These are the photos of the album you are cleaning up or, when removing albums, the photos that are only in those albums, from all of them together. After merging, the app does this by itself with the photos of the new album, to find near-duplicate series.
Hidden photos. The app does not show, count or look at photos you hid in Photos: they are not in the counts, not among the photos of an album and not in the workbench. The app does deliberately ask iOS for hidden photos too when it reads which photos are in an album, when it changes albums and when it restores. If iOS gives it a hidden photo, the app uses only its ID and the fact that it is hidden. It then keeps, for each album, the IDs of the hidden photos in it: in the index and in the snapshots, and so also in an export and, if your iPhone makes one, in a backup of your iPhone (see below). This way the app leaves an album with a hidden photo in place when removing, merging and restoring, and a snapshot knows which album that photo belongs in. The app also uses the estimate by iOS of the number of photos in each album: if it counts more photos than the app sees, the app keeps that difference in the index, as a sign that the album holds a hidden photo. When the app updates an album it already knew, it lets that difference grow by no more than the number of photos that went out of sight anywhere in your library since the last time without being reported as deleted. That way photos you just deleted or took out of the album, which the estimate still counts for a moment, usually do not count; if a photo went out of sight elsewhere at the same time, such a photo can still count for a moment. When it reads an album for the first time, because the album is new or because the app reads everything again (the first time, when iOS gives no history of changes, or when the app cannot use its saved index, for example because the file cannot be read or a new version saves it differently), it takes the estimate as it is. Right after such a change, the difference can then also be a photo you just deleted or took out of the album. In addition, the app itself remembers which albums probably hold a hidden photo. If it can no longer find a photo it saw in an album anywhere, and the history of changes from Photos does not report it as deleted, it keeps the ID of that photo with that album, also if this happened while the app was closed, but not when the app then reads everything again: then it cannot tell a hidden photo from a deleted one, and it remembers nothing new. Those IDs are kept in a file of their own on your iPhone, apart from the index. They are not in the snapshots, and so not in an export either, and the app excludes that file from backups. An ID is removed again when the app sees the photo again, when Photos reports it as deleted, or when the album is gone. This too is how the app leaves such an album in place when removing and merging.
What iOS gives the app here is up to iOS. In our tests in the simulator, on iOS 27.0 with the Hidden album locked (the default), iOS gave the app no hidden photo at all. Then the index and the snapshots hold no IDs of hidden photos for any album; the file of its own described above can hold them. A photo that was visible in an album when a snapshot was taken, and that you hid afterwards, does stay in that snapshot: with its ID and, if Photos provided one, its iCloud ID. So it is also in an export and, if your iPhone makes one, in a backup of your iPhone. If the app puts your albums back to such a snapshot, that ID and iCloud ID can also end up in the log, among the photos the app could no longer find (see the table below). Without that lock, on iOS 26 and on a real iPhone, it has not been tested what iOS gives.
The app asks for no other access: not your location, not your camera and not your contacts. Place names are looked up in a list that is part of the app (from GeoNames). Nothing is sent to a map service for that. For the proposals, the app estimates from the locations of your photos where you live: the place where you took photos on the most days. That way it sees on which days you were away. The app makes this estimate in memory, each time again; it does not keep it and sends it nowhere.
The app requests images of your photos without internet access, for the workbench and for the thumbnails on screen. So it does not download a photo that is only in iCloud and not on your iPhone. The app has not yet been tested with photos that really are only in iCloud.
What the app keeps on your iPhone
Everything is kept in the app's own storage on your iPhone, apart from a few messages in the iOS system log (see "The iOS system log" below). Part of it is included in a backup of your iPhone, if your iPhone makes one; the last column says which.
| What | What for | Included in a backup of your iPhone? |
|---|---|---|
| An index of your albums and photos: what is listed above under "from your albums and folders" and "from your photos and videos" (of the estimate by iOS, only how many photos it counts more than the app sees), for each album the IDs of hidden photos if iOS gave them, and the change token from Photos | So the overview appears right away when you open the app, and the app then only needs to read what changed | No. The app excludes the index from backups; it is rebuilt when needed. |
| A list of albums that probably hold a hidden photo: for each album (with the ID Photos gives it on this iPhone) the IDs of photos the app could no longer find anywhere, without Photos reporting them as deleted (see "Hidden photos" above). In a file of its own, apart from the index, and not in the snapshots or an export | So the app leaves such an album in place when removing, merging and restoring, also if it was closed when you hid the photo (unless it then read everything again) | No. The app excludes this file from backups too. The app cannot rebuild this list. |
| Workbench results: for each photo it looked at, a series of numbers that describes the image, a quality score, whether it looks like a screenshot or document, and when the photo was last changed | So a next visit to the workbench is faster, and a changed photo is looked at again | No, also excluded. |
| Rewind snapshots. A snapshot holds: the names of your own albums and folders, which album is in which folder and in which order, which photos are in each album, for each album the IDs of photos you hid in Photos if iOS gave them, and for each visible photo in an album its iCloud ID if Photos provides one. Albums, folders and photos are listed with the IDs Photos gives them on this iPhone. Also: when the snapshot was taken, for which action (the kind and the title; the title is usually the name of the album or folder the action was about), and with which version of the app | So you can restore every action | Yes, if your iPhone makes backups (in iCloud or on a computer), like the data of other apps. |
| The Rewind log. For each action: the kind and the title, when, how it ended (completed, failed, interrupted or undone, with an error message if an action failed), and a summary of what changed. That summary holds the names and IDs of albums and folders that were added, removed, renamed or moved to another folder, the names of the folders they were in or went to, the names and IDs of existing albums that photos were added to (the album you move photos to in the workbench, an existing archive album, and albums that get photos back when restoring), the names of albums that stayed because they probably hold hidden photos, photo counts, and for moving in the workbench whether it was photos, videos or both. For a restore it also holds the IDs of photos the app could no longer find (deleted, or hidden in the meantime and no longer visible to the app), with their iCloud IDs if Photos gave them | So you can see what you did and restore every action | Yes, in the same way. |
| A few settings: whether folders are on, whether you have seen the introduction, which proposals you skipped | So the app remembers your choices | Yes, in the same way. |
A snapshot never contains photos, thumbnails, faces or captions, and not the locations of your photos. The name of an album or folder can be a place name, though, and then it is in the snapshot, an export and the log: the names the app suggests for a proposal are made with the place where the photos were taken, such as "Avignon, July 2025", and when renaming, a pattern with {place} puts the place of an album's photos in the name. The app makes thumbnails of your photos only to show them on screen; it does not save them.
When you open the snapshot of an action in Rewind, the app keeps a copy of it ready for the share sheet, so you can export it. The app deletes that copy when you close the snapshot, or otherwise at the next launch of the app.
The iOS system log. Like many apps, the app also writes short messages to the iOS system log, to be able to track down errors. Readable in it are only counts (such as how many albums and photos the app read or changed), how long something took, the access status, whether the image model of iOS works, why the app read your whole library again, and kinds of errors. Names of albums and folders, IDs, and error messages that may contain them are marked private by the app there; according to Apple, iOS masks them in the log. That log is not in the app's storage but belongs to iOS: how long iOS keeps the messages is up to iOS, and if you delete the app, messages that were already in it stay for as long as iOS keeps them. The app sends the log nowhere; what iOS does with it, for example when you share analytics with Apple, is up to iOS.
How long? The app updates the index and the list of albums that probably hold a hidden photo while you use it. To the workbench results the app adds what the workbench finds out about a photo. A photo that changed after the workbench looked at it, for example because you edited it, gets new results when the workbench looks at it again and something comes of that; otherwise the old ones are kept. The app does not take out the results of photos you deleted. If the app cannot read the file with the results, or a new version of the app keeps them differently, it starts over: what the workbench finds out after that goes into a new file that replaces the old one. Snapshots and the log are not deleted by the app on its own, and you cannot clear them in the app either. If you delete the app, iOS deletes everything the app kept in its own storage on your iPhone; not the messages in the system log (see above). Whatever was already in a backup of your iPhone stays there until that backup is replaced or deleted. Your albums and photos in Photos stay as they are.
What does not happen
- No account. The app does not know who you are and has no user ID.
- No analytics and no advertising. The app contains no third-party code for analytics, advertising or crash reporting, and does not track you across other apps or websites.
- No server of our own. The app sends your photos, albums or data about them nowhere.
- No selling or sharing of data from the app. The app collects nothing for the publisher, so from the app there is nothing to sell or share either.
iCloud
The app has no iCloud storage of its own. However:
- Changes the app makes to your albums are changes in Photos. If you use iCloud Photos, Photos passes them on to your other devices. That is done by Apple, not by the app.
- If your iPhone makes an iCloud backup, the snapshots, the log and your settings are included, and with them your album names and the IDs of your photos. These can include IDs of hidden photos: of photos that were in an album when a snapshot was taken and that you hid afterwards, and, if iOS gave them, the IDs of hidden photos for each album (see "Hidden photos" and the table above). The index, the list of albums that probably hold a hidden photo and the workbench results are not included.
When you share something yourself
If you export a snapshot from Rewind, you choose where the file goes, using the share sheet. The file is the snapshot itself, as it is stored in the app. So it contains everything listed for snapshots in the table above: your album and folder names, the structure, for each photo in an album its ID on this iPhone and its iCloud ID if Photos provides one (also if you hid that photo afterwards), for each album the IDs of hidden photos if iOS gave them, when the snapshot was taken, for which action (the kind and the title) and with which version of the app. Wherever you send it, the rules of that app or service apply.
What the publisher receives through Apple
The app has no crash reporting of its own and itself sends the publisher nothing. What Apple shares with the publisher is arranged by Apple, not by the app. According to Apple, it can be:
- Download and sales figures, summarised, in App Store Connect.
- Usage figures (App Analytics), summarised, such as how often the app is used. According to Apple, only from people who have chosen on their iPhone to share analytics with app developers.
- Crash reports. For the version from the App Store, according to Apple only if you have chosen on your iPhone to share analytics with app developers. That is your choice in iOS, and you can turn it off there again.
- TestFlight. If you test a beta version through TestFlight, Apple shares data about you and your use of the beta with the publisher, as well as feedback you send yourself. Which data that is exactly is set out in Apple's explanation of TestFlight and privacy.
When you email
If you email for support, the publisher receives your email address and what you write. The publisher uses them only to answer your question and, if you report a problem, to fix it. You get no newsletter or advertising, your email is shared with no one, and it is deleted no later than twelve months after the last contact.
Seeing and deleting your data
What the app keeps is on your iPhone. In Rewind you see for each action what changed. The log keeps more than the app shows there: also the IDs of albums, folders and photos, and the error message if an action went wrong. Of the snapshot, you see in Rewind only when it was taken and how many albums, folders and photos it holds; you see its full contents by exporting it. Only a snapshot can be exported, not the log. The app does not show the list of albums that probably hold a hidden photo, and you cannot clear it in the app; you only see which albums stay because of it when removing, merging and restoring. If you delete the app, iOS deletes everything the app kept in its own storage on your iPhone; iOS clears out the messages in the iOS system log itself later. Whatever was already in a backup of your iPhone stays there until that backup is replaced or deleted. Backups are managed in iOS, not in the app.
The publisher has nothing of yours from the app. What the publisher can have of yours is an email you sent yourself, and what Apple shares with the publisher (see "What the publisher receives through Apple"). If you want an email deleted, write to the address below. The same goes if you want to know what Apple shared with the publisher, or want it deleted: the publisher looks it up and deletes what can be deleted.
Changes
If this privacy policy changes, the new version will be on this page, with a new date at the top.
Contact
- Dennis Siersma
- info@farcon.cloud