Privacy
Chinagraph does not collect, transmit or share any of your data — with us or with anybody else. There are no accounts and no servers of ours, and the app has no networking code of its own. Your photographs are read and written where you keep them, on your Mac, and nothing goes anywhere unless you send it yourself.
Chinagraph is a Mac app for the work around photo editing: copying memory cards, choosing the photographs worth keeping, merging several frames into one, and adding places, captions and copyright before exporting. There is nothing to sign in to.
None. No accounts, no analytics, no advertising identifiers and no crash-reporting service. The app never opens a connection to send us — or anyone else — anything at all. We do not know how many people use it or what they photograph.
Chinagraph runs in the Mac App Store's sandbox, so it can read only what you give it: a folder or a memory card you choose in the open panel. It remembers that choice as a security-scoped bookmark — the system's way of letting one app reopen one folder you picked — so you are not asked again next time. It keeps no catalogue and copies nothing into itself.
What it writes goes where the photographs are: ratings, labels, captions, keywords, positions and copyright into an XMP sidecar beside a RAW file, or into a JPEG or HEIC file itself, leaving the pictures untouched. Copies made by Ingest go to the folders you choose. A merge keeps its aligned frames in a temporary scratch file, deleted when the next merge replaces it or the app quits.
Cull can flag a frame where someone's eyes look closed. To do it, Apple's Vision framework finds faces and their eyes in a small preview, on your Mac. Nothing about a face is stored, compared with another photograph or sent anywhere, and no one is identified. The flag is shown and then forgotten when the folder is closed.
In its own settings: your IPTC preset (creator, copyright, contact), your export presets and name templates, and the bookmarks to folders you opened. These stay on your Mac and are removed with the app.
Two system APIs are declared in the app's privacy manifest, and this is all they are used for. Before a merge writes its scratch file, Chinagraph asks how much space is free, so it can refuse rather than fill your disk. When Ingest copies a card, each copy keeps the original file's dates.
Chinagraph is free, with one optional in-app purchase that lifts its limits. That purchase goes through Apple's App Store. Apple tells the app whether it has been bought and nothing else: we receive no payment details, no Apple Account name and no record of who bought it. StoreKit is the only part of Chinagraph that talks to a network, and it talks to Apple.
Chinagraph is not directed at children and collects nothing from anybody, of any age.
If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date at the top. Since the app collects nothing, a change would mean it had started doing something it does not do today, and that would be said plainly in the release notes as well as here.
Questions about this policy: pablinme@me.com.