A photo editor that doesn't keep your photos

What do websites do with your photos after you upload them?

Almost every online editor explains in detail what it can do to your image. Very few explain, in plain words, what happens to the file once the result is on your screen. The answer is usually buried in a privacy policy written for lawyers: phrases such as "we may retain content to improve our services" or "for as long as necessary" that leave you with no date and no limit.

That vagueness matters more than it seems, because of what people actually upload:

• Family portraits. A scanned photo of your grandparents, a picture of your children, a wedding print you want to restore old photos from. These are images of people who never agreed to be in anyone's dataset.
• Product photos that are not public yet. A new range, a prototype, packaging before launch. If you remove the background from a photo of something that is still confidential, you want that file gone once the work is done.
• Documents. Scans of an ID card, a contract, a receipt with your address on it, a screenshot with someone's phone number. People clean these up, enlarge them or compress them all the time without thinking about where the copy ends up.

There are three things a site can do with an uploaded photo once it has served you the result. It can keep it in your account, in a gallery or history that sits on its servers until you delete it, and sometimes after. It can use it to train or fine-tune its models. Or it can delete it on a schedule. Only the last one is compatible with not having to worry later, and only if the schedule is written down and short.

So the questions worth asking any service are concrete: where is the file processed, how long is it stored, is there a copy anywhere else, is it used for training, and can a person look at it? Below are Airpic's answers, with times rather than adjectives.

Are my photos deleted after editing? The exact timeline at Airpic

Airpic does store your file, briefly, because a GPU cannot process an image that does not exist on a machine. What we can promise is how short that storage is and that it ends on its own. This is the full life of a file, in order.

1. Upload over HTTPS. When you choose a photo, your browser sends it encrypted over HTTPS to temporary storage used only for files in transit. There is no account behind the upload: no email, no password, no username attached to the file.
2. Processing on a GPU in the European Union. The file is handed to a GPU worker running in a data centre in the European Union. The worker reads the image, runs the model you chose (upscaling, background removal, restoration and so on) and writes the result back.
3. The original is deleted when processing ends. As soon as the job has finished, the file you uploaded is removed. It is not needed any more: what matters now is the result.
4. The result is kept only so that you can download it. The finished image and its preview stay in temporary storage for one reason: so you can look at the before-and-after comparison and download the file.
5. Deletion one hour after download. Once you download the result, it is deleted one hour later. The hour gives you room to download again if the first attempt fails or you closed the tab too quickly.
6. One day at most, whatever happens. If you never download it, because you changed your mind or forgot, the result and its preview are deleted after one day at the latest. There is no setting that extends this and no way to ask for it to be kept.

Two details complete the picture. First, there are no backups of images: the temporary storage is not copied anywhere else, so deleting a file means it is gone, not moved to an archive. Second, the GPU workers do not keep a local library of past jobs: each one receives a file, processes it and sends back the result.

In short: your original exists for the length of the job, and the result exists for one hour after you download it, one day at the very most. After that, Airpic has nothing of yours to lose, leak or reuse.

What we don't do with your images

A deletion schedule only means something if nothing happens to the file while it exists. These are the things Airpic does not do, and could not do quietly even if it wanted to, because of how the service is built.

• We do not train models on your images. The models behind the tools are open-source models trained by their authors on public datasets. Airpic runs them as they are; it does not collect customer photos to retrain or fine-tune them. Your portrait does not become someone else's output.
• Nobody reviews your photos by hand. There is no moderation queue, no quality team browsing uploads and no sampling of jobs for inspection. Files go from your browser to a GPU and back, and then they are deleted.
• We do not sell or share your images. No image, thumbnail or description of an image is passed to advertisers, data brokers or partners. There is nothing to sell: the files do not stay long enough to form a collection.
• We do not build a profile around your files. Without an account, there is no history linking today's upload to last month's. Credits are bearer codes kept in your own browser, not entries in a user database with your name on them.

One more point, because it is where many sites leak information without saying so: measurement. Airpic only loads Google Analytics and Google Ads measurement if you accept it in the cookie notice. If you choose "only what is necessary", or simply ignore the notice, that code is never loaded. And even when you accept it, the measurement receives events such as "a file was processed" or "a purchase was completed": it never receives your files or their names.

If you want to see how this approach compares with a general chat assistant or a typical editing subscription, the page Why Airpic sets it out side by side: no account, no copies, files deleted when the work is done and never used for training.

Privacy when uploading photos to an AI site: how to check it yourself

Any site can write "we respect your privacy". The better test is whether you can verify the claims without trusting anyone. Here is what you can check on Airpic in a couple of minutes.

1. Read the "What happens to your file" page. It is linked in the footer of every page and describes the same timeline as above, in technical detail: upload, processing, deletion, who touches the data and what we do not do. The times written there are the ones the system actually applies.
2. Look at the status page. The "Status" page, also in the footer, shows from your own browser whether the website, the temporary storage and the GPU workers are up. It is a small window into the infrastructure your file passes through, with nothing hidden behind a login.
3. Notice what is missing. There is no sign-up, no "My files", no gallery and no history. That is not a design shortcut: if there is no account, there is nowhere for your photos to accumulate. A service that keeps a gallery for you is, by definition, storing your images for as long as that gallery exists.
4. Watch the network yourself. Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab and process an image. You will see your file going to airpic.app and nowhere else. If you declined measurement in the cookie notice, you will see no requests to Google at all.
5. Test the deletion. Download a result, keep the download link, and try it again the next day. It will no longer work, because the file is no longer there.

Apply the same checklist to any other AI photo site you are considering. If it requires an account to upload, keeps a history, gives no deletion time, or mentions "improving our services" with your content, you now know what those phrases usually mean in practice.

One practical tip that works everywhere: before uploading a sensitive photo, think about whether you need the whole image. Cropping a document to the part you need, or using a scan without your address on it, reduces what leaves your computer in the first place.

When you don't need to upload anything at all

The safest upload is the one that never happens. For images, a GPU is needed and the file has to travel, briefly, as described above. For PDFs, it does not: PDFeitor is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that does everything on your own computer. You can merge PDF files, compress a PDF, sign it or run OCR on a scan, and the document never leaves your machine. For contracts, payslips, medical letters or anything with an ID number on it, that is the right choice.

For photos, the same logic applies in a different form: use a service that tells you exactly how long it keeps the file and then deletes it. That is the case for every image tool on Airpic, whether you want to compress images for a website, restore a family portrait or upscale an image for printing.

Step by step, this is how a job looks on Airpic, with the timeline from this article running in the background:

1. Open the tool you need, for example the upscaler. No account and no email are requested.
2. Drag your photo in, paste it or choose it. JPG, PNG (with transparency and 16 bits), WebP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF are accepted; EXIF orientation is applied and the ICC colour profile is kept.
3. Choose the settings, such as ×2, ×4 or a print size, and press process. Your file travels over HTTPS to a GPU in the European Union.
4. Check the result in the before-and-after comparison. Processing and previewing are free. As soon as the job ends, the original you uploaded is deleted.
5. Download the full file. You get one free full download a month; after that, credits that never expire. One hour after the download, the result is deleted, and after one day at most it is gone even if you never downloaded it.

Nothing to cancel, no account to close and no gallery to empty afterwards. When you close the tab, the only copy of your photo is the one on your own device.

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