Your photographs

Photographs of a kitchen are personal. They can show more than a tin: a letter on the worktop, a child, an address on a parcel. This page says exactly what Auto Prepped does with them, in four claims. Each claim is followed by the mechanism that makes it true, and where the product does not yet live up to a claim, the page says so. The same four appear on Settings → Photographs with the current state of each.

They are read, not kept longer than needed

A photograph is uploaded to read one thing from it: the barcode, or the printed date. It is checked to be a real image, re-encoded, and stripped of everything the camera wrote into it, including the location, except the time it was taken, which is needed to pair the barcode photograph with the date photograph. The stored copy is the re-encoded one; the bytes you uploaded are not kept.

The photograph is then kept for a fixed number of days and deleted by a job that runs every night. The number is shown on the photographs page. While the product is being set up the number is provisional, and the page says whether one has been set. What survives the deletion: the barcode that was read, the date candidates, and the record that a photograph was taken on a given day.

The nightly job also removes any stored photograph that has lost its record, so a picture cannot be left behind by a fault.

True today. The mechanism runs; the number is provisional until the retention period is decided.

Training is a separate opt-in

Reading dates well depends on examples, and your photographs would be useful examples. Auto Prepped does not use them for that unless you say so.

The switch is on Settings → Photographs. It is off unless you turn it on. It is not part of the terms of service and not part of creating an account. Any member of the household can turn it on or off, and each change is recorded with who made it; that record is in your export.

While the switch is on, the household's photographs are kept past the retention period rather than deleted, so they can be used. Turn it off and the next nightly job deletes anything past the period. That is the whole consequence; nothing else about your account changes either way.

True today. The switch exists and the retention job respects it. The wording of the switch is provisional.

Deleting a lot deletes its images

When you delete an item, its photographs are deleted in the same step, not afterwards and not by a later clean-up. The record and the picture go together, or neither goes.

Not yet true for items, because items are not yet created from photographs, so there is no item to delete. The step that does it exists and is tested; it will be used the moment items are created from photographs. True for your household: deleting the household deletes every photograph it holds in the same step as its records, and the stored files are removed with them.

Processing happens where it can

The intention is to do as much as possible on your own device before anything leaves it: read the barcode in the browser, and send only what the server needs.

Not yet true. Today the whole photograph leaves your device and is read on the server. Reading the barcode on the device is planned with the capture screen. Until it exists, this page will keep saying so.

Taking your photographs, or removing them

Your export, from Settings → Your data, contains every photograph the household still holds and the record of every one it has held, so you can see what was kept and what has already been deleted. Deleting the household deletes the photographs with it. Getting started describes both.