What never leaves your Mac
There is no cloud version of All Our Years, no account to create, and no server that stores anything about you or your family. The study of your archive, its index, its thumbnails, and every insight it produces (event names, people, timelines) stay on your Mac's internal disk. All Our Years does not run analytics or usage tracking of any kind inside the app.
The three things that do touch the network
All Our Years works fully offline for its core job: reading your archive and showing it back to you. Exactly three features make a network request, and here's precisely what each one sends.
1. Update check
The app periodically fetches static files from allouryears.com (the same appcast.xml an RSS reader would fetch) to see if a new version exists, and shows you the release notes before you install anything. Like any website visit, our CDN sees the request's IP address in its ordinary server logs. Nothing about your archive, your photos, or your usage is included in the request.
2. License activation and deactivation
When you paste a license key in Settings, All Our Years sends the key and a per-Mac instance identifier to Polar to activate that seat. Deactivating a seat (to move to a new Mac) sends the same two pieces of information. This happens once per Mac at activation, and again only if you deactivate. After activation, the app never calls home again to check the license, it stays unlocked offline.
3. Places map tiles
If you open the Places map, All Our Years loads map tile images from a map provider to draw the map itself, the same trade any mapping app makes. Only the map view is affected; no photo, filename, or anything else about your archive is ever included in that request.
Crash diagnostics
If All Our Years crashes, macOS may ask whether to send a diagnostic report, the same system prompt any Mac app can trigger. This is entirely opt-in and controlled by your macOS privacy settings, not by All Our Years. Reports stay on your Mac unless you choose to send them, and we only ever see one if you email it to us yourself.
Payments
All purchases are handled entirely by Polar, our merchant of record. We never see or store your card details. Polar's own privacy policy governs the checkout process, including whatever billing information they collect to process your payment.
Your photo drive
All Our Years opens your photo drive strictly read-only. It never writes to it, uploads from it, or sends any part of it anywhere, on any of the three network touches above or otherwise.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Meaningful changes (anything that adds a new kind of network activity) will also be called out in the release notes for the version that introduces them.
Contact
Questions about any of this: support@allouryears.com.