Our product principles

The principles that are at the core of our product are privacy, openness, personalization, and longevity.

Privacy

Your photos and videos stay on your phone. They leave it only when you decide to: when you share them, or when you copy, move, or back them up to a cloud or a network drive you have connected. There is no Piktures account to create, and no Piktures server receives your photos.

The app does use a few Google services:

• Firebase Analytics and Firebase Crashlytics send usage statistics and crash reports. Crash reports are how we find the bugs that only happen on some phones or some Android versions.
• Google Play tells Piktures whether you own a paid plan. The app asks each time it starts.
• Google ads are shown in the free plan: see Ads and your consent below.
• Google Maps draws the map in a photo's details.

The information you add stays with your photos. A personal tag is written inside the photo file itself, not on a server, so it follows the photo wherever you copy it. Personal tags work on JPEG photos and need Premium or Prime (also included in the former Plus plan).

Piktures also helps you keep private what you share. When you share photos, the Before sharing screen has a Remove location option under ADVANCED, so the photos are sent without their GPS position.

Ads and your consent

Ads are only shown in the free Basic plan. Any paid plan removes them, and there are none during your first 3 days.

When the ads are about to start, Piktures asks Google whether your consent is needed. If it is, Google's consent form opens. Your answer doesn't remove the ads: only a paid plan does.

To change your answer, open More → Settings → Privacy Settings → Ad Choices. Privacy Settings only shows when Google requires privacy options for you.

Personalization

There are few things more personal than the pictures you take, so Piktures lets you choose how you see them:

• each album can be displayed as a Grid, a Mosaic, or a List, with or without a Date separator;
• the list of albums can be Classic, Grid, or List;
• More → Personalisation sets the first screen you see, the gestures, the bottom bar, and the cover above each album.

Built to last

Piktures is designed to keep working without us. The gallery, the editors, and the Secret Space run on your phone and need no Piktures server. Even the Secret Space PIN recovery relies on a security question stored on your phone.

Paid plans are checked with Google Play. If Google Play can't confirm your purchase, a one-time purchase stays active, and a Prime subscription stays active for 7 days after its last successful check.

Openness

While Piktures is not open-source, it has an open philosophy: we provide a good option, and if you prefer something else, we let you use it.

• Piktures has no cloud of its own. It opens your photos where they are: on the phone, on an SD card, on a USB drive, on a network drive, or on the cloud services listed in Storage → ADD A NEW ACCESS. A USB drive and more than one remote access need Premium or Prime.
• The built-in photo editor has a button that opens the photo in another editor app.
• To watch a video in another player, such as VLC or MX Player, open the video, tap ⋮, then Play with.
• To always use another editor or player, go to More → Personalisation → Paid options and turn on Default Photo Editor or Default Video Player. This needs Premium or Prime (also included in the former Plus plan).
• Take a photo and Record a video, in an album's ⋮ menu, open the camera app that Android provides.