Illigata Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-04

The short version

Illigata does not collect anything. There is no account, no analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry of any kind. Your images, your searches, and what you do with them never leave your Mac.

That is not a promise about how carefully we handle your data. There is no data to handle.

What Illigata sends over the network

Two things, both to gabrieljeffrey.com, and nothing else:

1. Update checks. Illigata asks for a small file listing the current version. This is an ordinary web request, so our host sees what any web server sees: an IP address, a timestamp, and the app's version. We do not build profiles from it and we do not join it to anything else. You can turn update checks off in Settings ▸ Updates. (The Mac App Store version does not check at all — Apple handles its updates.)
2. Optional model download. If you use natural language search, Illigata downloads a model file once, about 290 MB. Downloading a file tells us nothing about your images, because your images are not part of the request.

Our website and those files are served through Cloudflare, which processes request data (including IP addresses) as our hosting provider in order to deliver them.

Illigata has no other network destinations. Nothing about your library, folders, filenames, searches, ratings or edits is transmitted anywhere.

What the AI features do

Natural language search, text recognition in images, content labels, quality scoring and finding look-alikes all run on your Mac, using Apple's on-device frameworks and the downloaded model. No image is uploaded for analysis, and no server is involved in producing a result. If you never download the model, those features simply do not run.

What Illigata stores, and where

All of it stays on your Mac:

• Your marks live on your files. Ratings, favourites, rejects and tags are written as standard macOS Finder tags on the files themselves, which is why Finder and Spotlight can see them. If you enable XMP, ratings are additionally written into image metadata or into .xmp sidecar files beside the originals.
• Caches and indexes — thumbnails, content labels, search indexes, develop settings and collections — are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/Lightbox/, ~/Library/Caches/, and the app's preferences. Deleting the app and those folders removes them.
• A local diagnostic log in ~/Library/Logs/Lightbox/, recording timings and stalls to help debug performance. It never leaves your Mac unless you choose to send it: Help ▸ Export Diagnostics saves a copy where you tell it to, and it is then yours to share or not.

Your files

Illigata reads the folders you point it at, and macOS enforces that with its own permission prompts. It does not scan your disk on its own.

Illigata does not modify your original files except when you explicitly ask it to — for example converting, rotating, renaming, or writing XMP. Where a conversion replaces a file, the original is moved to the Trash rather than deleted outright, and only after the conversion has been verified.

Purchases

If you buy Illigata directly, the payment is handled by our payment provider, who receives the details necessary to process it. We never see or store your card details. If you buy through the Mac App Store, Apple handles the entire transaction and we receive only aggregate sales reports from Apple, which do not identify you.

If you email us, we receive your email address and whatever you write, and we keep that correspondence so we can answer you.

If you ask on our website to be kept posted about Illigata, we store the address you typed and the date you asked — on our website host (Cloudflare), nowhere else — and we use it to send you Illigata news: release announcements and updates like that, nothing else, and never sold or shared. Write to us and we will delete it, before or after.

The website also counts downloads: pressing the download button stores a timestamp and, when your browser offers one, the name of the referring site — nothing else. No addresses, no identifiers, nothing that says who you are.

That correspondence and that list are the only personal information we hold about anyone.

Your rights

Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, delete, and port the personal data a company holds about you, and to know whether it is sold or shared.

We hold none, so there is nothing to access, correct, delete or port — with the exception of email correspondence, if you have written to us, and the Illigata updates list, if you joined it. Ask and we will send you a copy or delete either. We do not sell or share personal information, and never have.

Children

Illigata is a professional tool and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will appear at this address with a new "last updated" date. Because we collect nothing, a change here is unlikely to be about your data.

Contact

Questions about privacy: hello@gabrieljeffrey.com Gabriel Jeffrey, California, USA.