Privacy

Sluice is an application that runs on your own computer, on photos that are already there. This page says when anything leaves that machine, what goes with it, and what this website keeps. It covers the app and this site separately, because they are different things.

There is no Sluice account, no sign-in, and nothing reports back to us. We have no copy of your photos, no record of what you sorted, and no way to get either.

Your photos

Your photos stay on your disk. Sluice moves them between folders you named and never uploads an original anywhere. The library it builds is an ordinary folder you already own, and what you point at it is never copied off the machine as part of sorting or sifting.

What Sluice deletes covers the other half of this: which deletions it performs and what each one requires to be true first.

When something leaves your machine

Four things leave, and none of them is a photo of yours. Three are here. The fourth is the version check, which has its own heading below.

• Judging a photo, with a model you pay for. Sluice does not judge photos itself. Where you give it an API key, it sends sheets to the provider you chose, on your own account. A sheet is a grid of small tiles rather than your originals, and each tile has its file's name written under it. The names and the dates the photos were taken go along as text, so an answer can name one photo rather than another. What that provider does with what it receives is their policy and your agreement with them, not ours.
• Judging a photo, with an agent you already run. Here Sluice sends nothing at all. It writes the sheets into a folder on your disk and reads the answers back out. Where your agent takes them from there is between you and it.
• Checking your key. Activate key, in Settings, asks your provider which models that key can run. The key goes with the question. No photo does, and the question costs nothing.

Sluice has no service of its own to send anything to, and no model of its own to judge with.

The update check

An installed copy checks for a newer version, which is a request to GitHub for the latest release of the Sluice repository (opens in a new tab). That request carries what any web request carries, your IP address among it, and GitHub rather than us is who receives it. It says nothing about your photos, because it knows nothing about them.

Your API key

If you give Sluice a key, it goes into your operating system's own credential store rather than into a settings file, and it is sent to the provider it belongs to and nowhere else. How that works is on the key store page, which also covers what it does and does not protect against.

This website

Static pages served by Cloudflare. There is no analytics, no tracking script, no advertising and no third-party code of any kind on these pages. We do not know who visited or what they read.

One thing is stored in your browser, and only if you use the light and dark switch: your choice of look, under the name sluice-look. It never leaves your browser and clearing your site data removes it.

Cloudflare serves these pages and sees the requests, the way any host does. Downloads are served by GitHub, so following a download link is a request to them.