Your library stays yours.
Five rules we hold ourselves to. They are short because they are simple, and they apply the same to you, to the people you invite, and to us.
Faces are matched on your device.
When you pick photos, the sorting into children and days runs on your phone. Nothing is uploaded to be looked at; the only photos that ever leave are the ones you decide to keep.
Only photos you approve ever leave.
A photo joins the family timeline when you keep it, and not before. Your camera roll is not synced, watched or copied in the background. So a review can pick up where you left off, we keep a private record of what you kept or skipped: a scrambled id and a mark for each photo, never the photo or its details. Your phone also tells us how many photos are waiting for your review, sometimes while the app is closed. That is a number and nothing more, so your own copy of the digest can remind you.
When Small Years crashes or hits an error, it sends us a report so we can fix it: the version, the kind of phone or browser, where in the code it went wrong, and a scrambled id for your account. A report never holds a photo, a screenshot, a name, a caption, an email or a face print.
Family and friends see a timeline by invite only.
There are no public pages and no links that work for strangers. Each person you invite gets their own private way in, and you can close it any time from Family.
We never sell or train on your photos.
Your photos are not shared with advertisers, brokers or partners, and they are not used to train any model, ours or anyone else’s. Captions come only from your own words, typed or spoken. No AI ever looks at a photo.
You can export or delete everything.
From Account, download the whole library at full resolution, or erase the account. Erasing removes every photo, caption and comment for every family member within 30 days, and we email you when it’s done.
Nothing is kept on our side except purchase receipts, for subscriptions and book orders. For a book order that is the date, the size and number of copies, what was charged with tax, the state and country it went to, and the payment and printer references. For a Plus payment it is the date, the amount, whether it was monthly or yearly, whether it was paid by card or through Apple, and the payment reference. We keep them for our accounts. They hold no name, street address, email, card number, book title or photo, and they aren’t linked to you.
The full policy is the legal text; this page is the promise in plain words. Where they differ, we fix the policy.