Legal
Privacy policy
Last updated October 11, 2026
NotHotdog scans your Photos library on your own Mac. It has no server and no account system, and it doesn’t send your photos or anything about them to us. This page spells out what that means.
The short version
- We don’t collect any data. The app has nowhere to send it.
- Photos are analyzed on your Mac using Apple’s frameworks.
- The app contains no analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting code, and no third-party SDKs.
- It stores a small file on your Mac with the results of your scans and your choices. That file never leaves your Mac.
Photos access
NotHotdog asks for full access to your Photos library. It needs that to look at every photo, and to delete or hide a photo when you tell it to. It reads your photos to analyze them and shows blurred thumbnails in the window. NotHotdog doesn’t save thumbnails.
When you press Delete, macOS asks you to confirm, and the photo goes to Recently Deleted. When you press Hide, the photo moves to the Hidden album. Both are done through Apple’s Photos system. The app does not keep a copy of any photo.
How photos are analyzed
Detection uses Apple’s Sensitive Content Analysis framework, which runs on your Mac. The app also uses Apple’s Vision framework to compute a numeric fingerprint of each photo it flags, so it can recognize near-duplicates of photos you’ve already judged. Both run locally.
iCloud Photos
If a photo’s full-size original is stored only in iCloud, NotHotdog asks macOS to download it so it can be scanned. That transfer is between your Mac and Apple’s iCloud service, handled by the Photos system. We are not involved and never see it.
What is stored on your Mac
The app keeps one file in its own sandbox folder containing: Apple’s internal identifiers for
your photos, when each was last scanned, which are flagged, ignored, or marked Not Sensitive, and the
numeric fingerprints described above. It does not contain your pictures, and a fingerprint isn’t
an image and can’t be used to recreate a photo. You can erase it by deleting NotHotdog’s folder in
~/Library/Containers/co.wwwroot.NotHotdog, or reset the flagged list with
Rescan Entire Library in the app.
Third parties
NotHotdog doesn’t include or talk to any third-party analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting service. It makes no network connections of its own. The only network activity is iCloud downloading done by macOS, described above.
Mac App Store
NotHotdog is distributed through the Mac App Store and runs in Apple’s App Sandbox. Apple may collect information about downloads and, if you opt in, diagnostics, under Apple’s own privacy policy. We don’t receive photos or scan results from that.
Children
NotHotdog is meant for adults managing their own photo libraries. It is not directed at children and it doesn’t knowingly collect information from anyone, because it doesn’t collect information.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the date at the top will change with it. We have no way to contact you directly, so check back here if you want to stay current.
Contact
Questions? Email support@wwwroot.co or visit the support page.