What happens to the photo you upload
One photo goes in, an illustrated portrait comes out, and the photo is deleted. Here is that in full, in the order it happens.
If you are a grandparent or an aunt buying this as a gift, you may have been told - reasonably - not to put a child's photo through an AI service. That advice is worth taking seriously, and the honest answer is not "trust us". It is to say exactly what happens, so you can decide, and so you can tell the child's parent exactly what you did.
You upload one photo
A single clear photo of the child's face. It goes straight to our server over an encrypted connection. It is never posted anywhere, and it is never visible to another visitor.
It is drawn once, into a portrait
The photo is sent once to an external AI provider's API - on a paid commercial tier, whose terms mean it is not used to improve that provider's products and is not read by human reviewers - and comes back as an illustrated portrait of the child.
The photo is deleted
The photograph is kept for one reason after that: if the portrait does not look like your child, "Draw again" on the preview needs it to draw a new one from. It is deleted automatically seven days after you upload it, whether or not you ever use that button, and it is never used for anything else in between.
The book is drawn from the portrait
The cover and all twelve chapters are built from the illustration, not the photograph. That is also why the child stays recognisably the same person across the whole book.
We build and train no AI models of our own, we never sell or share the photo, and deleting your account deletes everything made from it.
Common questions
- What happens to my child's photo?
- It is used once, to draw an illustrated portrait of the child, and then deleted. Every later image - the cover and all twelve chapters - is drawn from that illustration, never from the photograph again. The photo is not published anywhere, not sold, not shared, and not used to train anything.
- Does an AI company keep the photo or learn from it?
- We draw the illustration through an external AI provider's API, on a paid commercial tier. Under that tier's terms, the prompts and files we send - your photograph included - are not used to improve the provider's own products and are not read by human reviewers. That distinction is the whole reason we pay for the tier instead of using a free one, and we re-check that it is still in force whenever billing changes. The provider is named in our Privacy Policy, which lists everyone who touches your data.
- Do you train your own AI on my child?
- No. We build and train no models of our own. The photo is an input to someone else's drawing tool for about a minute, and then it is gone.
- Who can see the photo while you have it?
- Nobody browsing the site. While it exists it is held at an address that cannot be guessed or derived from your book link, and it is only ever read by our own servers to draw the portrait. It is never shown on a page.
- I am the grandparent, not the parent. Can I upload a photo?
- Only with the parent or guardian's permission - that is a condition of using the service, not a formality. If you are giving the book as a gift and would rather not upload anything yourself, ask the parent to make the book and give it to them; the story and the child are what you are paying for either way.
- What if I change my mind?
- Deleting your account deletes the photos, the portraits and the books together. You do not have to ask us, and you do not have to explain.
- Do you use the photo for anything else - marketing, examples, the website?
- No. Every example on this site, including the faces on our likeness page, is generated rather than a real child. A page arguing that we handle children's photographs carefully is the worst place to publish one.
Comparing us with somebody else? We read what ten other personalized-book services publish about the same questions and put the quotations side by side: what each service says happens to your child's photograph.
The fuller legal version is in our Privacy Policy and Terms. If something here is not clear enough, that is worth telling us about - contact us and a person will answer.
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