Privacy Policy

Last updated: 11 June 2026

PixlStash is a self-hosted application for managing your own picture and video library. It is private by design: your content stays on hardware you control. This policy explains exactly what PixlStash does and does not do with your data, and the one optional feature that makes a network request to us.

Your library stays yours

Everything you import into PixlStash: your images and videos, and everything PixlStash derives from them (thumbnails, tags, captions, face data, search embeddings, ratings, and other metadata) is stored locally, in the library folder and database on the machine where you run PixlStash.

PixlStash does not upload, transmit, or send this content anywhere. There is no PixlStash account, no cloud sync, and no central server that receives your library. We cannot see your library, because it never reaches us. It stays under your control on your own hardware.

Sharing is explicit and user-controlled

PixlStash includes an optional sharing feature. Content is shared only when you choose to share it, only with the people you share it with, and only within the scope you select (specific images, sets, characters, or projects). Nothing is shared automatically or by default, and you can revoke a share at any time.

Optional update check (off until you turn it on)

PixlStash can check whether a newer version is available. This is the only feature that contacts a PixlStash-operated server, and it is off unless you enable "Check for updates" in Settings → Behaviour. Until you opt in, no update check is ever made.

When enabled, the app contacts https://pixlstash.dev at most once every 24 hours (it may check more often only when the most recent known release was a high- or critical-severity security fix, so you are warned promptly). Each check sends two pieces of information, both in the request URL:

1. Your current app version, and
2. Your installation type, as a coarse category — docker, pip, electron (the desktop app), or other.

As with any request to any website, the receiving server and its content-delivery network (Cloudflare) also see ordinary request information such as your IP address, the time of the request, and your app/browser user-agent. No part of your library, no login, and no personal identifier is included.

We use this information to:

• tell you whether an update is available, show you a changelog relevant to your version, and direct you to the correct way to update for your installation type, including flagging security-relevant updates; and
• produce a rough, aggregate lower-bound estimate of the number of daily active installations.

We use these values to produce aggregate counts only. We do not build a profile of you, and we do not use the IP address to identify you. If you later click the "update available" link, the upgrade page you are taken to receives your version and installation type so it can show you the right upgrade instructions for your install.

You can turn the update check off again at any time in Settings → Behaviour; once disabled, no further checks are made.

Software downloads from third parties

To do its work, PixlStash downloads AI model weights (for tagging, captioning, and search) and in the desktop app, when you add GPU acceleration, Python packages. These are fetched on demand from third-party services such as Hugging Face, the Python Package Index (PyPI), and the PyTorch download index. Those requests go directly to those providers and are subject to their privacy policies; PixlStash includes only what is needed to download the files (standard request information) and never your library content.

The PixlStash website and public demo

Visiting https://pixlstash.dev (including any public demo) is an ordinary website visit, subject to standard web-server and CDN request logging (such as IP address, request time, and user-agent).

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as PixlStash evolves. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated "Last updated" date above. However PixlStash will always be committed to privacy first.

Contact

Questions about privacy or this policy: email [email protected], or open an issue on GitHub.