Privacy Policy

Pictalens is the controller of the personal data described here. We are contactable at hello@pictalens.com, and that address reaches a person, not a queue. If you want to exercise any right in section 09, that is where to write.

When you submit a batch we receive the image files you choose, their filenames, and whatever the files carry inside them — camera model, exposure settings, orientation, and, if your phone recorded it, the location the photograph was taken. We read orientation and use it. We do not use location for anything, and we do not attach it to the images we return.

From each photograph we derive a preview, a thumbnail, a before-image and the edited output, and we record what the pipeline did to it — the geometry it measured, the corrections it applied, the model it used and what that cost. Alongside the batch we store the options you picked, any instruction you typed, and the version of the terms in force when you submitted.

Section 2 of the terms asks you not to upload photographs whose main subject is an identifiable person. That request exists because of this section: a photograph of a room is property data, and a photograph of a person is not.

Your account. Your email address, a name if you give one, and the sign-in records that keep you signed in. We sign you in with a link sent to your address, so there is no password to store.

Payment. Stripe collects your card details on its own pages and is the merchant of record. We receive a payment reference, the amount, the currency, the time, and the email address you gave Stripe. We never receive, and cannot retrieve, a card number.

Where you came from. If you arrive through a link we published, we set one cookie recording which link it was, so we can tell which channels work. It holds a campaign label, not a profile.

Use of the site. Page views, with batch identifiers stripped from the path before they are recorded. Session recording is off, page text is masked, and we do not capture form fields.

Errors. When something breaks we record what broke and which batch it happened to, so it can be fixed and, where it cost you a photograph, refunded.

Editing is done by generative models, not by a person and not by a filter. Your photographs are sent to a third-party model provider — currently OpenAI — along with the instructions that describe the edit. The provider processes them and returns an image.

We do not permit providers to train their models on your photographs. Where the provider offers that election, we make it, and we would not use a provider that did not offer it. Nothing you upload is used to train anything of ours either.

No human at Pictalens looks through your batch as a matter of course. We do look at individual photographs when a batch fails and needs diagnosing, or when you ask us to.

Because the output is generated, it is an edited photograph and not a record of the property. What the pipeline is instructed never to alter is set out in section 3 of the terms.

These are the third parties involved, and what each one receives. They act on our instructions, they are not permitted to use your data for their own purposes, and we do not sell your data to anyone.

Several of these are outside the UK and the EEA, principally in the United States. Where that is so, the transfer is made under the provider’s standard contractual clauses or its Data Privacy Framework certification.

We keep what you upload and what we make from it — your originals, the edited images, the thumbnails and the comparisons — for as long as you have an account with us. Nothing is deleted on a schedule.

We keep them because they are not reproducible: the photograph was taken in a room we will never stand in, and once it is gone neither of us can get it back. It means your work is still here if you come looking for it a year later, and it means we can re-run an edit rather than ask you to re-shoot.

You can end that at any time. Deleting your account removes every file we hold for you, permanently, within minutes — see section 9. You can also ask us to delete a single batch. Neither request is subject to any of the above: a retention policy is a statement about what we do on our own, never a reason to refuse you your own data back.

Your account and batch records — what was ordered, when, and what it cost — are kept until you delete your account. Payment records are retained by Stripe for as long as tax law requires, independently of us.

We set a session cookie when you sign in, and a first-touch cookie recording which campaign brought you here. Meta and PostHog set their own cookies for measurement. None of them are used to build an advertising profile of you across other websites beyond what Meta does with its own pixel.

You can block or clear all of them in your browser. Blocking the measurement cookies does not change anything about the service; only the sign-in cookie is required for a signed-in session to work.

We run outbound email to people in the property business who have not used the service. Their work contact details — name, work email address, employer, job title — come from Apollo.io, a business contact database, and are checked for deliverability by NeverBounce. We do not buy or use personal email addresses for this.

We do it on the basis of legitimate interest in reaching a business audience for a business product. Every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link, and an unsubscribe is permanent. A later import cannot resurrect an address that has opted out, by design. You can also write to hello@pictalens.com and ask to be removed, and to be told where your details came from.

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop using it for marketing, or object to processing. Write to hello@pictalens.com and we will answer within 30 days. There is no charge.

You do not have to ask us to delete your account. Signed-in customers can do it themselves from your dashboard, at the bottom of the page. It takes effect immediately and it is not reversible: your account, your batches, and every image file still held for them are deleted, and any example images taken from your batches are withdrawn from publication.

One thing survives it, deliberately. We keep your email address on a do-not-contact list so that a future contact import cannot start mailing you again. If you would rather we did not, say so at hello@pictalens.com and we will remove that too.

If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us first — but you are entitled to complain to your data protection authority without doing so.

The service is for people running property listings and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data about anyone under 16.

We may change this policy — most often because a processor in section 05 is added or removed. The version number and date at the top change with it, and material changes will be announced by email to account holders.