Hold Still Privacy Policy
Last updated: 11 September 2026
Hold Still does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data. There is no account, no upload, no analytics, and no server of mine. The app makes no network connections at all.
Your photographs
Hold Still takes one photograph a day and keeps it on the phone. The frames are plain JPEGs in the app’s own storage, one per day, named for the day they were taken. Nothing is copied anywhere, and nothing is sent.
The app asks for the camera the first time you use it, behind the page that explains what it does, and you can withdraw it in Settings. Two other things are asked for later and only at the moment you use them: notifications, for the daily reminder, and permission to add to Photos, for saving the reel. Nothing is asked for at launch, and each one is explained in the app’s own words before iOS puts its question up.
The app never looks at what is in a photograph. There is no face detection, no subject recognition and no automatic straightening. Yesterday’s frame is drawn faintly over the live preview so you can line the shot up by eye, which is the whole of the help it gives.
Hold Still never asks for your location, so nothing in the app knows where a photograph was taken. Each frame is re-encoded when it is saved, which leaves the camera’s own metadata behind rather than writing it into the file.
The reel
The reel is stitched from your frames on the phone, into a temporary file, whenever a day is added. It is rebuilt rather than kept, and iOS may clear it at any time.
Once seven days are in, Save to Photos puts a copy of the reel in your photo library, where it stays. Hold Still asks for add-only access to do that, which is permission to put a video in and nothing more. It cannot read, change or delete anything already in your library, and it never looks. The copy is made when you press the button and at no other time. If you have iCloud Photos switched on, that copy syncs the way every other video in your library does, which is between you and Apple rather than anything of mine.
Sharing the reel hands a video file to the iOS share sheet, and where it goes from there is your choice and the choice of whichever app you send it to. Hold Still is not involved after that, and it never shares anything on its own.
The daily reminder
The daily nudge is a local notification scheduled by the app on this iPhone at the time you chose. Nothing is pushed from a server, because there is no server. You can turn it off in the app, or silence it in Settings.
What else is kept
Your preferences, in the phone’s own settings store: whether the reminder is on and when, how strongly the ghost shows through, which camera you use, and whether the front camera is mirrored. The streak is counted from the frames themselves, along with the longest run you have managed.
What there is none of
No account, no sign-in, no iCloud, no sync, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no in-app purchases, and no subscription. The app is free and stays free.
Contact
Questions about this policy: email me at alex@alexecollins.com.
Help with the app itself is on the support page.