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Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 29, 2026 · Published: August 29, 2026

This policy explains what personal data Albums (albums.ink) collects, why, and what your choices are. The Service is operated by Albums ("we", "us"). For the operator’s full legal and registration details, write to the address below. Contact for anything privacy-related: support@albums.ink.

1. What we collect

• Account data. You sign in with Google. We receive your name, email address and profile picture. Your email is used only for authentication and service communication — it is never shown publicly and never shared for marketing.
• Profile data. The username, display name, bio and avatar you choose. These are visible to other users.
• Content. The photos, videos, voice notes, albums, posts and comments you create, and the privacy settings you assign to them.
• Usage data. Basic interaction events needed for the product to work — views, likes, saves, friendships — used for counters and recommendations inside the Service.
• Audience statistics. When an album card is shown to you or you open an album, we record the event together with the country derived from your browser's time zone, your browser language, how long the album page stayed open and where you came from inside the Service. Your IP address is not part of these records. Creators see only aggregated numbers for their own albums — never who visited.
• Optional profile details. Year of birth and gender, if you choose to fill them in. They are never displayed on your profile and appear only inside aggregated age and gender breakdowns shown to creators whose albums you viewed. You can clear them at any time in profile settings.
• Technical data. Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, timestamps) kept by our infrastructure providers for security and abuse prevention.
• Advertising data. If you consent to personalised advertising, our advertising partners receive your IP address, your browser and device characteristics, and which pages of Albums you view, and may combine this with data they already hold about you from other websites in order to choose which ads to show. Without your consent no advertising partner receives anything, and you see only our own promotions and non-personalised ads. See section 5.

We do not sell your personal data, and we never share your email address, your private albums or your media files with advertising partners.

2. A note on photo metadata

GPS coordinates are removed from every file we store, without exception. An album can never reveal where a photo was taken, whoever uploaded it.

Event albums keep your files at their original resolution and quality — that is what the album is for — so other technical EXIF fields such as camera model, lens and exposure are preserved alongside the image. The date of shooting is also read on your device to offer chapter grouping in your own album. Everywhere else in the Service photos are re-encoded for display, which strips embedded metadata entirely.

3. How your content is protected

Media is stored in private storage; it is served only through short-lived signed links generated after the same visibility check that protects the rest of the Service (public / friends / private / per-person exceptions). Your original files' visibility always follows the privacy setting of the album or post they belong to.

4. Who processes data for us

• Supabase — authentication, database and application hosting;
• Cloudflare — media file storage (R2) and serving the website itself;
• Google — sign-in (OAuth) and web fonts;
• Payment providers — when you buy paid features, checkout and card processing happen on the payment provider's side, in some cases acting as merchant of record. We receive confirmation of payment and the details needed for your entitlement, never your card number.
• Advertising partners — only if you consent to personalised advertising. The current list of partners, and what each of them does with your data, is shown on the consent screen and can be reopened at any time from the Privacy choices link in the footer. These partners act as independent controllers of the data they collect; their own privacy policies are linked from that screen.

These providers process data on servers that may be located outside your country. We share with them only what is necessary to run the Service.

5. Cookies, local storage and your advertising choices

Strictly necessary storage. We use browser local storage for things the Service cannot work without: your sign-in session, your language choice and your interface preferences. These are never used to track you across websites, and no consent is required for them.

Advertising. No advertising partner is loaded, and no advertising cookie or identifier is set, until you have been asked. If you are visiting from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we ask before anything advertising-related runs, on a screen where Accept and Reject are equally easy to choose, with nothing pre-selected. Refusing costs you nothing: the Service works in full, and you simply see our own promotions and non-personalised ads instead.

Changing your mind. Your choice is stored on your device and applies until you change it. You can change or withdraw it at any time through the Privacy choices link in the footer — withdrawing is as easy as giving consent was, and takes effect immediately for everything that happens afterwards.

Outside those regions we may show personalised advertising by default, and the same Privacy choices screen lets you turn it off.

6. Retention and deletion

Your data is kept while your account is active. When you delete content, it immediately stops being available in the Service; residual stored copies are purged within a reasonable period.

Event albums include one year of storage at original quality. Before that year ends we notify the organiser and offer three choices: renew storage, download everything as a single archive, or move the album into the Service as an ordinary album. If nothing is chosen we move it automatically — the files stay, viewable and shareable, at display quality instead of original. Original-quality copies are removed 30 days after the move, and the organiser is told before that happens. Nothing is ever deleted because a payment stopped.

To delete your account and associated data, contact us at support@albums.ink — we will process the request within 30 days, except data we must retain by law.

7. Your rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your personal data, and to object to certain processing. Where we rely on your consent — which for advertising is the only basis we use — you may withdraw it at any time through the Privacy choices link in the footer, without giving a reason and without losing access to any part of the Service. Withdrawing does not undo processing that already took place before you withdrew. For anything else, write to support@albums.ink and we will honour these rights.

8. Children

The Service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. Content that endangers minors is removed and reported to the relevant authorities.

9. Changes

If this policy changes materially, we will give notice within the Service or by email before the changes take effect.