Panosphera keeps your photos on your device.

We do not receive your photos. Optional link sharing stores a copy in your iCloud.

Last updated October 13, 2026.

What the app accesses

Panosphera asks for access to your Photos library so it can find and display your 360° photos, 360° videos, and panoramas. The access is read and write: writing is used only to mark a favorite, to add a scene, sample video, or file you asked for, to save a view you framed, to keep the Panosphera album, and to delete an item when you ask — and Photos shows its own confirmation before anything is deleted. That is the only permission it requests. It does not use your location, your contacts, your microphone, or your camera.

What stays on the device

• Your photos and videos are read from your library and displayed on the device. We do not receive them. The one time a photo or video leaves the device is when you share it as a link, and then it goes to your own iCloud; see Sharing a link.
• Captions are produced by the speech recognition built into your device. Audio is not sent anywhere.
• The subjects Share as Video moves between, the top picks, and the Featured moment are chosen by image analysis that runs on the device.
• Place names shown in Events and search come from the location data your own photos carry, looked up through Apple's Maps service. The coordinates sent are the photo's, not your device's; Apple's privacy policy applies to that lookup, and we never see it.
• The small map in an item's Info, and on a scene's or a place's page in Explore, is drawn by Apple's Maps service from that same location: the photo's or the scene's, never your device's. Open in Maps hands that location to the Maps app.
• Guided clips and stills you export are written to a temporary folder on the device and handed to the share sheet you choose. Where they go from there is up to you.
• When you share an original from the share sheet, what goes out is a copy with the location, camera, and owner details removed; only the picture, its orientation, its date, and the 360° tag remain. Copying or dragging a file out on the Mac gives you the untouched original.

What we collect

Nothing about you. Panosphera has no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, and no advertising identifiers, and we never receive your photos, your library, or anything about how you use the app.

The one time the app talks to a server of ours is when you share a link: an encrypted copy of that link — not the photo, and not readable by us — is kept on panosphera.app for as long as the link works, which is 30 days at most, and is erased within a day after that. It is there so the link can be short and can be stopped. See Sharing a link.

When the app does use the internet

Apart from the place lookup above, the one-time captions language-model download from Apple, the originals Photos fetches from your own iCloud library when you open an item that is stored there, and a link you choose to share (below), the Explore tab — its scenes, the Around the world row, and full screen — is the only part of Panosphera that reaches outside your device:

• Browsing scenes. Explore, and its full-screen run, show free 360° panoramas from Poly Haven, the European Southern Observatory, NOIRLab, and the U.S. National Park Service. Opening the tab fetches those catalogs and their thumbnails; looking at a scene full screen, or adding it, downloads that picture. Those sites see the request, as any website does when you visit it. They are not told who you are, and nothing about your own library is sent.
• Around the world. The conditions shown over each place come from Open-Meteo. The coordinates sent are the published location of that place — Venice or Stuttgart, say — and never yours. Panosphera does not ask for or use your device location.
• Links out. The source links open a website inside the app using Safari's own browser. From that point you are browsing the web normally, and that site's privacy policy applies.

None of this involves an account, and none of it sends your photos anywhere. Sharing a link, below, is the one exception, and only when you ask for it.

Sharing a link

Share as Link, on iPhone and iPad, lets someone look around one of your 360° photos or videos in their web browser. It is the only feature that sends a photo or video off your device, and it does so only when you choose it, for the one item you chose, after a screen that says what will happen.

• Where the copy goes. A copy of that photo or video is saved to your own iCloud, in Panosphera’s folder of your iCloud storage, and iCloud publishes it as a link. It counts against your iCloud storage. The photo or video is not sent to us: we cannot see it, list it, or open it. The copy keeps the picture, its orientation, its date, and its 360° tag, and nothing else — no location, no camera details, no name.
• The short link. Apple’s own link is several hundred characters long, so the app makes a short one for you. Your device scrambles Apple’s link and keeps the scrambled copy on panosphera.app under a short code until the link stops, and it is erased within a day after that; the only key that unscrambles it travels inside the link you send, in a part of the address that browsers never pass to any web server. So panosphera.app holds a few lines it cannot read, never the photo, and learns only that a code exists and when it is opened, as any web page visit does. Making the link sends one request from your device to panosphera.app.
• Who can see it. Anyone who has the link. There is no password and no sign-in, so share it the way you would share the photo itself. The link does not include your name, your email address, or your Apple Account.
• How long it lasts, and stopping it. Every link stops on its own after 30 days. Stop Sharing in Settings ▸ Shared Links ends a short link at once, by deleting its entry, and removes the copy from your iCloud; Apple may keep its published copy until the 30 days are up, but nobody was given its address. If panosphera.app cannot be reached while a link is being made, no link is made: the app takes the copy back down and asks you to try again.
• What the viewing page does. The link opens a page on panosphera.app that shows the 360°. The page loads the picture directly from Apple’s iCloud servers into the viewer’s browser. It uses no cookies, no analytics, and no third-party services; its fonts and code are served from panosphera.app.
• What Apple receives. iCloud stores the copy and delivers it to whoever opens the link, under Apple’s privacy policy. As with any web address, Apple’s servers see the internet address of each person who opens it.

If you never use Share as Link, nothing in this section applies: nothing is uploaded.

This website

Everything above is about the app. The pages of panosphera.app itself — every one of them, including this one, the home page, Features, Support, and the page shown when an address is not found — count their visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, from the company that hosts the site. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, and does not follow you to other sites. It records that a page was viewed, the page that linked to it, and the country, browser, and kind of device, as totals; we see those totals and nothing about any one visitor. Cloudflare’s privacy policy applies to it. The page a shared link opens is left out: it carries no analytics at all, as described above.

Data the app stores

Panosphera keeps small caches on your device so it can open quickly: which items are 360°, which videos are downloaded, place names, captions, the search index, the Explore catalogs, the look paths you record for guided clips, and a short record of any crash or hang, which is shown to you only if you choose to send a report. Deleting the app deletes them.

Children

Panosphera does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date.

Contact

Panosphera is made by Doug Ross, one independent developer; “we” in this policy means him. Questions about privacy: support@panosphera.app.