Privacy, and why there is so little of it to describe

We never see the screenshots you put together; the joining happens inside this tab, and the only file that goes anywhere is the one you save at the end.

The short version

There is no server here to send a picture to. The site is a set of static files; when you open pictures, your browser reads them, arranges them and writes the result to your downloads folder. No account, no queue, no storage, nothing to delete afterwards.

What happens to a picture you open

It is read into memory as pixels, turned upright if the camera left a tag saying it should be, converted to ordinary sRGB colour, and held for as long as the tab is open. Closing or reloading the tab is the end of it. Nothing is written to your device by this site, and nothing is written to ours — we do not have one in the sense that word usually means.

Two things are worth being precise about, because “nothing leaves your device” is a phrase that gets used too loosely. First: when you open a picture that is an iPhone HEIC, the decoder needed to read it is fetched from the network at that moment. It is code arriving, not your picture leaving. Second: the file you save at the end obviously does go somewhere — into your own downloads. That is the point of it.

Is anything counting this visit? No

There is no measurement property set up for this site, so no counting script is put into the page and your visit leaves no tally anywhere. That is a plain statement of how the build is configured rather than a philosophy: the token that a counter would need is still a placeholder, and the page deliberately renders nothing at all rather than a beacon that would phone home and collect nothing.

If that ever changes, the intention is a cookie-free counter that records the page address, a rough country and the kind of browser asking — no cookie, no following you between sites, no way of knowing what you joined. This paragraph gets rewritten on the same day the script arrives, not afterwards.

What the advertising will see

This site is built to be funded by Google advertising, and we would rather tell you what that means before it turns up than after. No advertising is being served on these pages yet: the domain is waiting on Google’s review, the switch in the code is off, and no ad script is requested by any page here today.

When the review comes back and the switch is turned on, a Google-served unit will sit below the reading material on the tool routes and inside the guides. It will see the address of the page it is on and whatever your browser volunteers, the same as it would anywhere else, and it may use cookies or similar storage subject to your browser’s settings and Google’s own. What it will not see is your pictures: those are pixels held in this page’s memory, never files on a network, and there is no path from one to the other for anybody to take.

The place a unit may sit is fixed in the code rather than left to judgement — below the prose, never above the wizard and never between two of its steps — so when advertising does arrive, nothing you touch while joining pictures will have a paid slot beside it.

Children

This is a general-audience tool and is not directed at children under 13. Since we collect nothing about anyone, there is nothing held about a child either.

Changes, and how to check

If this ever stops being true, this page changes first. The claim is also checkable rather than merely stated: open your browser’s network panel, join some pictures, and watch what is requested. Today the list is short — the page itself, its fonts and its scripts, and, if one of your pictures is a HEIC, the decoder that reads it. No counter, no ad script. Your pictures are not in the list either, because there is no code here that could send them.

Questions go to hello@mergepicture.com. Last reviewed 10 September 2026.