What happens to the images you upload

Nothing is uploaded until you press the button

Choosing files does not send them. The thumbnails you see while you are selecting, reordering or removing images are drawn from the files on your own machine — the browser can read them locally without any of it leaving.

That means a selection you change your mind about never reaches the service at all. Only when you start the task do the bytes travel.

Two hours, then gone

Every task is created with an expiry two hours ahead, and that expiry is set in the same operation that writes the record. There is no cleanup job that has to run on time and no flag anyone can forget to set: when the clock passes, the record ceases to exist because the storage layer removes it itself.

The files are a separate matter, since they do not live in that store, so a sweep runs regularly, lists what is on disk, and deletes anything whose task is gone. The bucket also carries its own lifecycle rule as a second line of defence, for the case where the sweep is not running at all.

Download links are signed and short-lived

A finished result is fetched from a URL that carries a cryptographic signature over the object it names and the moment it expires. Neither can be edited without invalidating it, so a link to one task cannot be adjusted into a link to another.

Those links expire on their own, well inside the two-hour window. Downloads are always served as attachments with a generic content type, so a file cannot be coaxed into executing in the browser as though it were part of this site.

What is stripped, and what is not

Photographs carry metadata — camera model, settings, and frequently the exact coordinates where the picture was taken. Compress removes that by default, and it is a checkbox you can switch off when the EXIF is the point.

Other tools keep or drop metadata according to what the operation means. Converting a photograph to a different format generally does not preserve it, and rotating losslessly deliberately keeps it so that nothing about the file changes except its orientation.

Frequently asked questions

Are my images used to train anything?

No. They are processed, made available for you to download, and deleted. There is no model being trained and no dataset being collected.

Can anyone else reach my files?

Task identifiers are random and unguessable, and download links are signed and expire. Nothing is listed publicly.

Can I delete something before the two hours are up?

There is no delete button, because there is no account to delete from. Closing the tab is enough — the expiry runs regardless of whether you come back.