Your photos, your trips, your call.

What we collect

Your account

When you sign up we receive your email address and, if you use Google, your name and profile picture. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication, so your password is never stored by TripStory.

Your photos and what’s inside them

When you create a trip you add photos. Photo files contain metadata - usually the date and time they were taken, the location (GPS), and the camera’s orientation. We read that metadata to work out your days and places. Before you upload, the landing page’s instant preview reads it in your browser only; nothing is sent until you ask for a story.

Photos you import

If you import from Google Photos, you choose the photos in Google’s own picker and we receive only the ones you picked, with their date and camera details. Google doesn’t share their locations with us. The access Google gives us is short-lived and used only to fetch the photos you picked: we never store it, and we close the picking session afterwards. Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

If you paste a link to an iCloud shared album (a beta feature), our servers read the photos in that album the way anyone with the link could. We never sign in to your iCloud account.

What we make for you

For each trip we create smaller copies of your photos, short captions, the place each photo was taken (from its location, or recognised from what it shows), the story in the voice and language you choose, your route, a film with an original soundtrack and living photos, and a preview image for sharing. Edits you make (titles, sentences, places, cover choices) are saved too.

What visitors leave

People viewing a journey page can react and leave a comment with a name they choose. Reactions are counted with a random identifier stored in the visitor’s browser, not an account.

Usage and diagnostics

We record product events (see Analytics and cookies below), and our servers keep standard logs - request times, errors and performance data - to keep the service running.

How we use it

• To make and show your trips, and to let the people you choose see them.
• To run, secure and improve TripStory - for example, finding where uploads fail or how long films take to render.
• To reply when you contact us, and to send essential account messages (never marketing without your consent).

We don’t sell your personal information, share it for advertising, or use it to build profiles about you.

AI and your photos

To caption your photos, recognise places and write your story, we send downscaled copies of your photos, together with the places and dates we found and any notes you wrote about the trip, to Google’s Gemini models through Google Cloud. The results come back to us and are stored with your trip. Your notes are never shown on your journey page.

When a photo has no location - phones and Google Photos often remove it - the same model suggests where it was taken from what it shows: a landmark, a sign, the landscape. We check each suggestion against your other photos, mark the places found this way, and you can move any of them.

To make living photos - a few seconds of motion in some of your film’s best shots - we use an image-to-video model:

• On your free first trip and with a Trip Pass: an open model (Wan 2.2) running on TripStory’s own servers in Google Cloud. Those photos never leave TripStory.
• On Explorer: Kling (Kling AI, by Kuaishou Technology) or Google Veo (Vertex AI, part of Google Cloud). Downscaled copies of the photos chosen for motion are sent to them, and the clips come back to us.

We keep AI motion away from close-up faces and children, and every AI-animated scene in a film is labelled.

Your photos are never used to train AI models. We only use AI services under terms that prohibit the provider from training on our customers’ content, and we don’t train models of our own on it.

AI can get things wrong - a place, a detail, a mood. Everything it writes is editable, and nothing is shared until you share it.

Journey pages and sharing

Each trip has a visibility setting that you can change at any time: Public (anyone can view it, and it may be featured on TripStory), Anyone with the link, or Only you.

When a trip is shared, visitors see its title, story, photos, film, route and the places you visited. To protect you, journey pages never include your photos’ GPS data or exact timestamps, place coordinates are rounded to roughly 100 metres, and your name is shortened (for example, “Dana K.”).

Anyone who can see a journey page can also copy its route or download what’s shown on it, so share with people you trust.

Who helps us run TripStory

We use a small number of service providers, each only for the job listed:

• Google Cloud and Firebase - sign-in, database, photo and film storage, servers and job queues; the Gemini models for captions, place recognition and stories; Veo for Explorer’s living photos; and the servers our open living-photo model runs on.
• Kling AI (Kuaishou Technology) - makes living photos for Explorer trips. It receives downscaled copies of the photos chosen for motion, processed through its API in Singapore.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim - turns the approximate coordinates of your places into names like “Sintra”. Our servers send coordinates only; no photos or account details.
• OpenFreeMap - serves the map tiles your browser shows. Like any website, it sees your IP address and which part of the map is being viewed.
• Stripe - processes payments for paid plans. TripStory never sees or stores your card number.

Google Photos and iCloud are places you choose to bring photos from, not providers we send your data to: we only fetch the photos you pick or share with us.

Fonts are served by TripStory itself, and we don’t embed social-media widgets or advertising scripts.

Analytics and cookies

We measure how TripStory is used with our own, first-party analytics - no third-party trackers. Events like “page viewed”, “trip started” or “film played” are sent to our servers with:

• a random visitor identifier (the ts_vid cookie) and a session identifier, linked to your account only while you are signed in;
• the page, the website that referred you (domain only) and campaign tags in the link you followed;
• page performance timings and error messages, so we can fix what’s slow or broken.

The website (www.tripstory.fun) and the app (app.tripstory.fun) share a few first-party cookies, so your choices follow you from one to the other:

• ts_vid - the random visitor identifier above (1 year);
• ts_consent - your privacy choice (1 year);
• ts_theme and ts_lang - your theme and language (1 year);
• ts_auth - a hint that you are signed in to the app, so the website can offer “Open TripStory” (30 days; it is not a credential);
• ts_ft and ts_ref - how you first found us (the referring site, campaign and first page; 90 days) and the journey page that brought you (30 days).

We don’t use advertising cookies, and any optional third-party analytics tool stays off unless you allow it in Privacy choices. Firebase Authentication keeps you signed in to the app using your browser’s storage. You can clear cookies and storage at any time in your browser settings; TripStory will simply treat you as a new visitor.

How long we keep things

• Trips and your account: until you delete them. Deleting a trip removes its photos, film, story, comments and reactions from our database and storage immediately.
• Uploads that never became a trip: removed with the trip draft they belong to.
• Google Photos access: used only while we fetch the photos you picked, never stored; the picking session is deleted afterwards.
• Living-photo records (which engine animated which photo, and how it went): 30 days.
• Analytics events: kept in aggregate-friendly form for up to 25 months, then deleted.
• Server logs: kept for about 30 days.

Your choices and rights

• Change who can see any trip, edit anything we wrote, or delete a trip, from the app.
• Delete your account and every trip in it yourself, from your Account page. It takes effect immediately.
• Download your films as MP4 files at any time.
• Ask us for a copy of your data, or to correct it, by emailing hello@tripstory.fun. We reply within 30 days.

Depending on where you live (for example the EU, UK, Israel or California), you have legal rights to access, correct, delete, port and object to the processing of your personal data, and to complain to your local data-protection authority. We honour these rights for everyone, wherever you are.

Security

Everything travels over encrypted connections. Photos are stored in private storage buckets and served through unguessable links; only your account can change your trips. No system is perfectly secure, so we keep what we store to what the product needs.

Children

TripStory isn’t meant for children under 13 (or under 16 where local law requires it), and we don’t knowingly collect their data. If you think a child has created an account, contact us and we’ll delete it.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy we’ll update the date at the top, and tell you by email or in the app before any change that affects how your photos are used.

Questions or requests: hello@tripstory.fun. See also our Terms.