What happens to your photographs

Who we are

PhotoWrite is operated by an independent developer based in Japan, who is the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at info@photowrite.co.

What happens to a photograph

One photograph reaches us at a time, and never your original file. From the Lightroom plug-in it is a JPEG preview of the frame; from the browser it is a copy reduced to 768 pixels, made in your browser before anything is sent — and for a raw file, the preview the raw already carries. Either way it travels with the coordinate, the capture time and any existing IPTC values that photograph already holds.

• The image is held in memory only. It is never written to disk, never added to a database, and never used to train anything of ours.
• It is sent to a third-party AI provider to be read. They process it under their API terms; we do not grant them rights to it.
• When the response comes back, the image is discarded. There is no copy to delete afterwards, because none was made.

The coordinate travels further than the image does. It is sent to address and elevation services and to map tile providers in order to render the map the model reads. Those requests carry a latitude and longitude and nothing that identifies you or the photograph.

What we store

The whole of it, and this is a complete list:

• Your account identifier, issued by our sign-in provider.
• Your email address.
• Whether your account is currently active, and the dates your account and key were created and last used.
• A one-way hash of your API key, plus its first few characters so you can recognise which key you are holding. We cannot read your key back to you, because we never stored it.
• Your balance of scans, and a ledger of the changes to it — each entry a date, an amount, a short reason and the balance it left. This is what lets us and you both answer “where did my scans go”.
• One row per scan recording the date, whether it succeeded, and the size of the request measured in the units our supplier bills us in. It names your account and nothing about the photograph — not the file, not the coordinate, not a word of what came back.
• If you buy scans, a record of the purchase — our payment processor’s own identifier for you, and for each payment its reference, how many scans it bought and when it arrived. No card details, and no card. We never see them: the checkout page belongs to the processor, not to us.

No photographs. No coordinates. No place names. No descriptions. Nothing PhotoWrite wrote about your pictures is kept on our side — it goes into your catalogue and stays there.

Who else is involved

A small number of suppliers act on our instructions and on no one else’s: an AI provider in the United States, which receives the photograph, its coordinate and its capture time in order to read it; address, elevation and map providers, which receive a coordinate and nothing that identifies you or the photograph; and providers of sign-in and hosting, which hold what is listed above; and a payment processor, which runs its own checkout page and is told your email address, our identifier for your account, and which pack you are buying, so that what you paid for reaches the right balance. None of them is permitted to use any of it for their own purposes. We will name any of them if you ask — write to info@photowrite.co.

Map and address data is drawn from OpenStreetMap and from national mapping agencies, and is used under their own licences.

What never leaves your machine

The plug-in writes two log files into your Lightroom folder — a record of each scan, and an undo record of each write. Neither is ever sent to us. They exist so you can audit or reverse what PhotoWrite did, and they are yours to delete.

How long we keep things

• Photographs: not kept at all.
• Account, key, balance and scan records: for as long as your account exists, and for 30 days after you close it.
• Server logs: diagnostic records naming your account identifier and the outcome of a scan, kept for 30 days.
• Purchase records: the same as your account. The transaction itself is the payment processor’s record rather than ours, and it keeps that for as long as its own legal obligations require.

Why we may use your information

We use what is listed above only to run the service you asked for: to authenticate your scans, to tell you and us whether your account is active, to take payment for scans you buy and put them on your balance, and to keep the service working and secure. We do not use it for advertising, we do not profile you, and we do not sell or share it with anyone beyond the processors described above.

Your rights

PhotoWrite is operated from Japan and handles your information under Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI). You may ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to stop using it, and ask us to delete it. Given the list above, a copy of everything we hold is a short document.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the UK GDPR and the GDPR also apply to our offering the service to you, and you have the further rights they give — to a portable copy, to object to or restrict processing, and to complain to your own supervisory authority.

Write to info@photowrite.co and we will answer within one month.

Where your information goes

We are in Japan, and the processors described above operate in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Japan holds an adequacy decision from both the European Commission and the United Kingdom, so information reaching us from the UK or the EEA needs no additional safeguard. Onward transfers to those processors are made under the contractual terms each of them offers.

Changes

If this page changes materially we will say so here and date it. Continuing to use PhotoWrite after a change means accepting the revised version.