Privacy Policy

Picalator for iPad and Apple TV · Last updated 25 August 2026

The rest of this page says the same thing at greater length, because a privacy policy has to.

Your photos

Picalator reads the albums you choose from Apple Photos so it can display them. It does this entirely on your device.

• Your photos are never uploaded, copied off the device, or sent anywhere.
• Your photos are never modified. Adjustments you make in Picalator — keeping a photo on screen longer, changing its brightness, taking it out of the rotation, or cropping a single picture inside its frame — affect only what Picalator displays. The originals in Apple Photos are left exactly as they are.
• Picalator has no ability to delete your photos.

You can change or withdraw Picalator's access to your photos at any time in the Settings app, under Privacy & Security → Photos.

Faces

Photographs drift slowly across the screen. So that a face does not slide off the edge, Picalator works out whereabouts in the picture the faces are and keeps the movement centred on them. Where a photograph has no faces in it, the same is done for whatever else the picture is of.

This is face detection, not face recognition.

• What is worked out. A rectangle: the position and size of a face within the photograph. Nothing else. Picalator does not create a faceprint, a template, or any other biometric identifier, and it cannot tell one person from another, match a face against any other photograph, or group photographs by who is in them.
• What it is used for. One thing only: deciding where on the screen to hold the picture as it moves.
• Where it happens. Entirely on your device, using Apple's Vision framework, on the copy of the photograph already in memory.
• How long it is kept. In memory only, for as long as the app is running, so that a photograph coming round again does not have to be measured twice. It is never written to storage, never included in a backup, and never placed in iCloud. It is gone the moment Picalator closes.
• Who it is shared with. Nobody. It is never transmitted off the device. There are no servers, no analytics and no third parties of any kind.
• Deleting it. Closing the app discards it. There is nothing left behind to delete.

Weather

If you turn weather on, Picalator asks iOS for your device's approximate location and passes it to Apple's WeatherKit service to get the current conditions for that place. Apart from the map described below, this is the only information Picalator ever sends off the device, and it is sent to Apple, not to me.

Your location is used for nothing else. It is not stored, not recorded, and not associated with you. Weather can be turned off in Picalator's settings, and location access can be withdrawn in the Settings app under Privacy & Security → Location Services.

Maps

Photographs often carry the place they were taken, recorded by the camera at the time. Where a photo has one, Picalator offers a map button, and tapping it draws the surrounding area with a pin on the spot.

• This happens only when you tap that button. Nothing is sent while the frame is simply showing photos.
• To draw the map, that photo's coordinates are sent to Apple's Maps service. The photograph itself is not sent, and neither is anything else about it.
• The coordinates come from the photo's own information. Picalator does not ask iOS where you are in order to do this, and the map says nothing about where you are now — only where that picture was taken, whenever it was taken.
• Photos without a recorded location simply don't offer the button.

Tapping Open in Maps hands the same coordinates to the Maps app, which is then Apple's app behaving in its usual way.

Apple's handling of both the weather and the map requests is covered by Apple's privacy policy.

Music

If you turn on music controls, Picalator asks permission to see your Apple Music library so it can list your playlists and operate the Music app's play, pause and skip. It reads the names of your playlists in order to show them to you. It does not send them anywhere.

Your settings

Your choices — which albums to show, clock style, the times the screen turns off, and so on — are stored on your device. If you are signed in to iCloud, they are also stored in your own private iCloud storage, so that your iPad and Apple TV agree with each other.

That iCloud storage is yours. It sits in your Apple Account, I have no access to it, and it is covered by Apple's privacy policy. Nothing is sent to any server belonging to me, because there isn't one.

Children

Picalator is suitable for all ages. It collects no data from anyone, including children.

Third parties

Picalator contains no third-party SDKs, no analytics libraries, no advertising and no crash reporting. Nothing about your use of the app is shared with anyone.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted at this address and the date at the top updated.

Contact

Questions about privacy in Picalator: support@alator.app

Alator, Australia.