Privacy
Last updated 16 October 2026. Mantel is in early testing.
The short version. Your photos are stored privately and only you, and anyone you invite into a shared library, can see them. We don't show ads, we don't sell data, and nothing you upload is used to train anyone's AI. A few services help run Mantel and see a little of your data to do their job; they're listed below.
What we store
- Your account: your name, email address, a scrambled form of your password (we can't read it), and, if you use Face ID or Touch ID, a public key for your device. The private key never leaves your device.
- Your photos and videos: the original files exactly as you uploaded them, plus a small thumbnail and, for iPhone HEIC photos, a viewable copy.
- Facts about each photo: its date, size and file name, and what's inside the file itself, such as the camera, lens and GPS location if your phone recorded one. From the location we work out a place name.
- What's in each photo: a short description, tags and a quality score written by AI, which power search and Cleanup.
- Faces: where faces are in a photo and a list of numbers measuring each one, used to group the same person. These measurements are made in your own browser, not on our servers. The names you give people are stored with them.
- Your choices: favourites, albums, captions, album covers, and who added each photo to a shared library.
Who can see it
Your library is visible only to you. If you invite someone into it, they can see, download and add to everything in that library, and you can see theirs in it. You can remove people from your library at any time. Your other libraries are never shared.
The people who run Mantel can technically access stored data to keep the service working and fix problems. We don't look through your photos.
Services that help run Mantel
- Cloudflare hosts the site and stores your files and data.
- Anthropic (the makers of Claude) writes the photo descriptions. Only the small thumbnail of each photo is sent, along with its date and file name. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, this isn't used to train their models.
- OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) turns a photo's GPS position into a place name. Positions are rounded to about 100 metres first, and each place is looked up only once.
- Resend sends account emails, such as confirming your address or resetting your password.
- Google Fonts supplies the typefaces, so your browser fetches font files from Google.
Cookies
We use two cookies: one keeps you signed in, and one remembers which library you're looking at. Your browser also stores a few preferences, such as your chosen layout. There are no tracking or advertising cookies.
Keeping and deleting
Deleting a photo removes the original, its thumbnail and everything we worked out about it. You can download your originals at any time. You can delete your account from Account in the app: that deletes your own library with all its photos, and takes you out of any libraries you joined. Photos you added to someone else's shared library stay there for them.
Changes
If we change how your data is handled, we'll update this page and the date at the top before the change takes effect.