What happens to your picture

We take it out. Your picture arrives here with its metadata — the GPS position, the camera, the lens, the time it was taken — and we remove all of it before anyone sees the picture. The file you uploaded is not kept: only the picture we make from it, and a hash of your file, so that a picture taken down cannot come back.

• Your browser sends the fileIt goes to OpenVibe.Pics over HTTPS, whole, with everything inside it. Nobody can strip what they never receive, so the file with its GPS reaches us first.
• We check what it really isIt has to decode as a JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP or AVIF picture, within 20 MB and 100 megapixels. A renamed script, an SVG or a half-written file is refused, and nothing is stored.
• We make a new picture from itThe picture is decoded and saved again in the same format. The EXIF orientation is applied, so a photo taken sideways is shown upright, and the colour profile becomes sRGB. Every metadata block — EXIF with its GPS and camera, XMP, IPTC, comments — is dropped on the way out. The file we keep has none of them.
• We keep the new picture, not your fileThe new picture is stored as a private object in OpenVibe.Media, with a 640-pixel thumbnail beside it. Your uploaded file is never stored. One thing of it is kept: a SHA-256 hash, so that a picture which was taken down cannot be uploaded again — even resized or re-compressed.
• Every other size comes from the new pictureThe other widths and formats are made from the picture we keep, so they carry no metadata either.

• The picture itselfThe bytes we made from your file, and a 640-pixel thumbnail.
• What you wroteThe title, the description and the alt text, and who wrote them.
• What the file isIts size, its format, its width and height, and whether it moves.
• Its hashesThe hash of the picture we keep, the hash of your file, and a difference hash used to spot near-copies.
• When it arrivedThe time it was uploaded, and when it was last looked at.
• Who put it hereYour OpenVibe account, for a signed-in upload. For a signed-out upload, a keyed hash of the address, used only to count the uploads a day.

• What you may put hereThe content policy, and what happens when a rule is broken
• Pictures and AIWe do not train on your uploads; here is the one thing that asks a model
• Terms of serviceThe rules of the network, in plain language
• PrivacyWhat this service collects, and why