FirstPass — Privacy Policy

What we do not collect

FirstPass does not collect, transmit, store or share any information about you or your work. There is no account, no sign-in, and no way to create one.

• No personal identifiers of any kind

• No device identifiers

• No usage data, analytics, telemetry or crash reporting

• No photographs, thumbnails, previews or anything derived from them

• No file names, folder paths, camera serial numbers or card contents

• No payment information — purchases go through Apple, and we never see them

• No email address — unless you type one into the release-notes signup yourself

FirstPass contains no advertising, no third-party SDKs, and no tracking framework. It will never ask permission to track you, because there is nothing to track with.

The one thing you can choose to send

FirstPass 1.7.2 added an optional signup for release notes by email, reachable from the About window and the Help menu. It is the only part of the app that makes a network connection, and it makes none until you type an address and press the button.

The same list can be joined from the FirstPass page on this website, without the app involved at all. Both routes reach the same list and collect the same single thing.

• Your email address goes to Buttondown, the service that sends the notes. Nothing else goes with it — no name, no device, nothing about your photographs or your Mac

• You confirm the subscription by email before anything is ever sent to you

• Every message carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes the address

• The address is used for release notes and nothing else — never sold, never rented, never used for advertising

• Ignore the signup and FirstPass never opens a connection at all

Your photographs

FirstPass copies files from your cards and cameras to folders you choose on your own disks. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Your images are never used to train anything, never inspected by us, and never leave your Mac unless you move them yourself.

Ratings and colour flags are kept in FirstPass's own metadata store, so your originals are never rewritten. Exporting with re-encoding carries the original metadata into the new file — EXIF, capture date, camera make and model, GPS — and adds the star rating as XMP, which other applications read. Transfer reports — CSV manifests, PDF summaries and ASC MHL sidecars — are written to the folder you nominate and to nowhere else.

Permissions FirstPass asks for

Pictures is the one folder FirstPass can open without asking, because it ships with the entitlement for it. Everywhere else — another folder on your Mac, an external disk, or a memory card in Fast mode — macOS asks you once, and your answer is remembered so it does not ask again for that card or that disk.

That permission lets FirstPass read the files you point it at. It grants us nothing: we have no way to see what you granted, or what was in it.

The App Store

FirstPass is sold through the Mac App Store, and Apple handles the purchase. We receive only the aggregate sales reports every developer gets, which say how many copies sold in which country and nothing about who bought them. FirstPass itself performs no licence check and contacts no server of ours, because there is no server of ours.

Your rights

Regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights over personal data a company holds about you. We hold none. There is nothing to access, export, correct or delete, and we are glad to confirm that in writing if you need it for your records.

Changes

Any change to this policy will be posted here with a new effective date. Because FirstPass collects nothing, no change will ever introduce data collection without a separate and prominent notice in the application itself.

Contact

Questions about this policy: privacy@lightoncanvas.com. Help with the app: FirstPass support.