Privacy Policy
Heirloom is built so that this document can be short. Your photographs stay on your device. We don't collect them, upload them, or look at them.
Last updated 2 September 2026
The whole of it: the Heirloom app has no accounts and no servers. Everything it stores — your photographs, your decisions, your name — lives in the app's own storage on your iPhone. We have no way to read any of it.
What the app stores, and where
When you add a photograph to your Heirloom, the app copies it at full resolution into private storage on your device. It also records which photographs you've already ruled on, so it doesn't ask you twice, and the name you enter for your archive.
All of that stays on your iPhone. It is not transmitted to us or to anyone else. If you delete the app, that storage is removed with it — which is why the app offers an export.
Your photo library
Heirloom asks for access to your photo library so it can show you the photographs you took on today's date in previous years. It reads dates, locations and image data from your library to do that. It does not send your library, or anything in it, anywhere.
If you ask Heirloom to clear a photograph from your phone, it uses Apple's standard deletion, which moves it to Recently Deleted where it stays recoverable for 30 days. iOS asks you to confirm every deletion.
Location
Photographs often carry the coordinates of where they were taken. For photographs you keep, Heirloom asks Apple's geocoding service to turn those coordinates into a place name, so your archive can say "Brooklyn" rather than a pair of numbers. That request goes to Apple, not to us, and we receive nothing from it. Heirloom never asks for your live location and cannot see where you are.
What we collect
Nothing. There is no analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifier, no crash reporting, and no account. We do not know who you are, whether you opened the app today, or what's in your archive.
The one exception is deliberate and outside the app: if you email us to join the waitlist, we keep your email address so we can write back to you. We don't share it, sell it, or use it for anything else, and we'll delete it on request.
Notifications
If you turn on the daily reminder, your iPhone schedules those notifications locally. Nothing is sent through a server, including ours. You can turn them off in the app or in iOS Settings.
Children
Heirloom is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them. Since we collect nothing from anyone, there is nothing for us to hold.
Changes
If Heirloom ever adds accounts or cloud storage — and we intend to, so that your archive can survive a lost phone — this policy will be updated before that ships, and we'll tell you plainly what changes. We will not start collecting anything quietly.
Contact
Questions about any of this go to james@heirloom.so, and a person will answer.