‹ Our Heroes

Privacy Policy

Last updated September 29, 2026

Our Heroes ("we," "us," or "our") operates ourheroes.app (the "Service"), which lets people create and host photo galleries for the people, pets, and moments they love. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have. By using the Service, you agree to the collection and use of information as described here.

Information we collect

Account information. When you create an account, we collect a username, email address, and a password — which we never store in plain text; it's hashed before it touches our database. Collaborators invited to someone else's gallery provide the same information, minus anything gallery-specific.

Content you upload. Photos and videos you add to a gallery, along with captions, gallery titles, taglines, quotes, footers, story text, and section headers you write.

The original file, and what was already inside it. From 2 August 2026 we keep the file you uploaded exactly as you sent it, up to 8 MB per photograph, alongside the resized copy we display. We also keep whatever information your camera, phone or editing software had already written into that file — which can include the date and time it was taken, the equipment used, a description or keywords you added elsewhere, and, on some photographs, the location where it was taken. We keep it so that it is preserved rather than discarded, and so you can get it back when you download your photos. None of it is published. The copy shown on your gallery pages is rebuilt from the image alone and carries none of this; the original is never given a public web address. It is deleted when you delete the photograph, the gallery, or your account. You can download a photograph’s full original yourself, one at a time from My Photos (or, where no original was kept, the largest copy we hold), with the details you have recorded here included — written into the file itself for a JPEG, and in a small companion file beside it for other formats. So can the editors and caretakers you invite — a privileged role you grant — for the photographs in the galleries they help with: they get the same file you do, including what the file itself carries, such as where it was taken, and the details recorded here. Someone invited only to send photos in, or who only views a gallery, cannot.

Details you record about your photographs. In My Photos you can write down what you know about a photograph: a title and description, keywords, when it was taken and who took it, where it was taken, the event it belongs to, and who is in the picture. These details often name people who don't have an account here — recording who is in a photograph is the point of a family record — so they get the narrowest visibility we have: they are shown only to you — and to people you have invited as editors or caretakers of a gallery, for the photographs in that gallery, so the family members who actually know the pictures can help you describe them. Helpers can add (fill an empty field, add a name or a keyword) but never remove, and what a helper writes is recorded as theirs. Those editors and caretakers can also download those photographs with these details included, as described above. Someone invited only to send photos in sees none of this. One exception, which you control: the date in When was it taken? is shown beside the caption when that photograph leads a page of your gallery, so visitors see it there unless you turn off Show date for that photograph. Some of these names arrive with your photographs. If a photograph was tagged in another program — Lightroom, Picasa, Windows — the names it already carries are read in along with its other details and listed under People, marked as having come from a file until you have looked at them; you can keep, rename, merge or remove any of them. We read only the names, never where in the picture a face is. These details never appear on gallery pages, in photo captions, or anywhere public, and writing someone's name down does not make them visible or searchable to anyone beyond you and the helpers you chose. You can edit or clear any of these details at any time, and they are deleted with your account. One detail worth naming: if you delete a photograph, what you wrote about it is kept in your library rather than destroyed with the picture — shown nowhere and counted against nothing, but there again if you ever re-upload the same photograph. We keep it because this service exists to record what you know before it is lost, and a description you typed is exactly that. And if you remove a person's name from your library entirely, the name itself is gone — we keep only an unreadable fingerprint of it, so that a photograph's hidden file data cannot quietly re-add a name you chose to remove. Typing the name again yourself clears that too.

Awards, testimonials and comments people leave. Anyone who can see a gallery can leave a testimonial, give an award on it, or comment on one of its photographs. When they do, we store the message, the name they give, and — if they were signed in — a link to their account, which is what puts a verified check beside their name. We also record the sending computer's IP address, kept only so we can deal with spam and abuse. The gallery's owner reviews every submission before it appears, and can hide or remove one at any time. These are part of the gallery, so they're deleted along with it. If someone who wrote one while signed in later deletes their own account, what they wrote stays on the gallery without their name, the verified check or the IP address; one written while signed out keeps the name typed on it, because nothing ties it to an account (more on both below). A gallery owner may also bring across notes from a guestbook that existed somewhere else before, in which case they carry their original dates and whatever name the writer used at the time.

A short history of changes to each gallery. So that a change made while arranging a gallery can be undone, we keep the gallery’s list of photographs as it was before and after each change — their order, pages, captions and sizes — with who made the change. We keep the last 50 changes to each gallery, and none older than 30 days. It is deleted with the gallery. A photograph you delete permanently is removed from this history too. If a collaborator deletes their account, the changes they made stay with your gallery without their name.

Payment-related information. We don't process or store your card details ourselves. Purchases (access codes, additional photo capacity) are handled entirely by Stripe, our payment processor. We only receive confirmation that a payment succeeded and what you're owed as a result.

Collaborator invitations. If you invite someone to collaborate on your gallery by email, we store that address and whether the invitation was sent successfully, so you can see the status of your invites.

Whether your uploads worked. When you upload photos, we record that an upload happened and how it ended — how many photos you selected, how many arrived, and whether it succeeded, was refused, or failed partway. We keep this because when an upload fails badly enough, our server doesn't survive to notice, and without a record from your browser we'd have no way of knowing your photos never made it. It covers the upload itself, not the content of your photos, and it's deleted with your account.

Visits to public pages. On our public pages — the ones anyone can see without signing in, such as the home page, our guides and policy pages, and public gallery pages — we count page views so we can see which parts of the Service people actually use. That means the page visited, the site you arrived from, and general browser, device, and country information. It runs on software we host ourselves, so this information isn't handed to an analytics company. It sets no cookies, it isn't used to build a profile of you or to follow you across other websites, and it doesn't identify you.

Two kinds of page are deliberately left out. We don't count signed-in pages — your galleries page, the gallery builder, settings, uploads, or your account. And we don't count any page whose web address contains a private link or token, such as a password-reset link, a collaborator or group invitation, or a private view link, so those never reach our page-view records at all.

Cookies. A single session cookie keeps you signed in. It's required for the Service to work and isn't used for advertising or tracking across other websites. We don't use third-party analytics or advertising trackers — the page-view counting described above runs on our own infrastructure. If that ever changes, we'll update this policy.

How we use your information

Who can see your content

Galleries are public by default. Anyone with a gallery's link can view it, unless you set a viewing password in Gallery settings → Privacy, which asks visitors for it before the gallery opens. A viewing password guards the gallery page, not each photograph — photographs are served from their own web addresses, and anyone given one can open that photograph directly. Our Heroes is built for sharing rather than for confidential material: set a password before sharing a gallery you don't want browsed, and be mindful of what you upload.

Collaborators you invite can add, caption, and rearrange photos in a gallery, but never see your account password or change gallery settings.

We can see gallery and account metadata to provide support, respond to abuse reports, and maintain the Service. We don't edit your galleries' content or settings.

Third-party service providers

Running Our Heroes means some of your data passes through services we rely on:

Each provider has its own privacy practices governing the data it processes for us.

Data retention & deletion

You can delete a photo, a whole gallery, or your entire account at any time from Gallery settings. Deleting a gallery removes its photos from storage; deleting your account removes every gallery you own and your account record. There is no undo — we don’t offer a way to restore something you’ve deleted.

What deleting your account keeps, and why. A few records outlive your account on purpose, because they are the record of what was agreed and what was done — and a record that vanished whenever someone deleted their account would not be much of a record:

Support messages you sent us while signed in are deleted with your account. The only thing tying a message sent while signed out to you is the email address typed into the form, which anyone can type, so we can’t reliably tell it was yours — ask us through the contact form and we’ll delete those too.

What you wrote on other people’s galleries while signed in — testimonials, awards, updates and replies — stays where you left it, because it has become part of that gallery. It stays without your name, the verified check, or the IP address it was sent from, and reads as from “Former member”. Anything you wrote there while signed out is different: it keeps the name typed on it and the IP address it was sent from, because nothing ties it to your account. If you would rather something went, you can remove what you posted while signed in before you delete your account: while that gallery’s page is open to you, it lists those posts for you with a Remove button beside each. Otherwise the gallery’s owner can remove anything on their gallery at any time, or you can ask us through the contact form.

Backups are worth naming too. We keep encrypted backups of our database for up to 90 days, and an off-site copy of photographs so they survive a storage failure. Deleted content can persist in those copies for a period after you remove it. We don’t use them to bring back anything you’ve deleted, and they never serve your gallery — they exist so that a technical failure doesn’t cost you everything.

Some information may be retained by our third-party processors — for example, Stripe retains payment records as required by law — even after you delete your Our Heroes account. That's governed by their own policies, not ours.

Children's privacy

Our Heroes is not directed at children, and you must be at least 18 years old to create an account. We understand galleries often contain photos of children (and pets!) — that's expected and welcome — but the account holder uploading and managing that content must be an adult. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13.

Your choices

Security

We take reasonable measures to protect your information, including hashed passwords and signed, HTTP-only session cookies. No online service can guarantee perfect security, so we can't promise your information will never be exposed, but we work to keep it safe.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We'll update the date above when we do. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions about this policy or your information?
Reach us through our contact form.