Privacy

Last updated 7 October 2026

Picture Frame turns an iPad into a photo frame for an iCloud Shared Album. Two separate clouds are involved, and it helps to keep them apart:

Apple's iCloud holds your photos. They live in your iCloud account, in the Shared Album, exactly as they did before you used Picture Frame. Apple looks after them under Apple's privacy policy. Picture Frame doesn't change that.
The Picture Frame cloud is a small relay that asks Apple which photos are in your album. The relay never stores your photos, and keeps almost nothing else.

The frame also saves a copy of each photo on the iPad, so it keeps working when the internet drops out. Your frame settings live only on the iPad. This page explains exactly what goes where, and for how long.

Public Website: Who Can See Your Album?

Picture Frame needs you to turn on Public Website for the album in Photos. The name sounds alarming, so it's worth understanding exactly what it does.

Public Website doesn't put your album on a public list, in a search engine, or anywhere people can browse. It creates one private link, and that link is the only way in. The end of the link is a long random code, like this:

icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B7kQ2mR9tLpZ4vN8cYe1HwX5sJ3fD6gA0uVb...

Think of the link as a key rather than a street address. Nobody can look the album up, stumble across it, or guess the code, because there are more possible codes than grains of sand on Earth. As long as you never share the link with anybody else, no one can find your album.

The flip side is that the link works for anyone who has it. There's no password behind it. So:

Only share the link with people you'd happily show the photos to. Anyone you send it to can forward it.
Treat the setup QR code the same as the link, because the code contains the link. Don't post a photo of it online.
The frame's Home Screen icon also holds the link, so anyone who picks up the frame iPad could find it. That's fine for a frame on your own bench or wall.

If you think the link has got out, open the album in Photos, tap the people icon and turn off Public Website. The old link stops working straight away, for everyone. Frames keep showing the photos they've already saved, but get nothing new. Turn Public Website back on to get a brand new link, then set the frame up again with it.

Note: Picture Frame sends the album code to its relay over an encrypted connection to fetch the photo list, and the relay doesn't keep it (details below). The relay never shows the link to anyone.

What the Picture Frame Cloud Never Keeps

Your photos. They stay in your iCloud account with Apple. The iPad downloads each photo straight from Apple and saves a copy on the iPad. Photos never pass through the Picture Frame relay.
Accounts. There are no accounts, so there are no names, email addresses or passwords to store.
A list of who uses it. The relay keeps no record of people, and no record of which albums it has seen. The only thing it keeps about a frame is the anonymous counting code described below.
Your album link, permanently. The relay uses the album code to ask Apple for the photo list, then forgets it. The relay never writes album codes to a log.
Your settings. The album, the weather town and the time on each photo stay on the iPad only.

What the Picture Frame Cloud Keeps, and for How Long

The Picture Frame relay runs on Cloudflare, a large hosting network with data centres around the world. Two things sit there briefly, and one thing stays longer:

Your album's photo list, for up to 15 minutes. The list holds the album name, Apple's code for each photo, the photo sizes and the first comment on each photo, if it has one. It doesn't hold the photos. The relay keeps the list for 15 minutes so that two frames showing the same album only cost one request to Apple. The relay files the list under a scrambled version of the album code (a one-way hash), not the code itself. After 15 minutes the list expires and Cloudflare discards it.
Your internet address, for 60 seconds. The relay counts requests from each internet address for one minute, to stop anyone using it to flood Apple with requests. The count then resets.
An anonymous counting code, for up to four months. See the next section.

Note: like every website host, Cloudflare handles the basic details of each request (such as your internet address) to deliver the page and protect it from attacks. Cloudflare's own privacy policy covers that.

Counting How Many Frames Are in Use

Picture Frame is free, and I'd like to know whether anyone is using it. So each frame makes a random code the first time it runs, something like 4f9a07c2e1b86d35a0c7e419. The iPad makes the code up on its own. It isn't based on your name, your iPad, your Apple account or your album, and it can't be traced back to any of them.

About once a day, the frame sends that code to the relay along with its normal photo check. The relay records two things: the code, and the date it was seen. That's all. Counting the codes tells me how many frames are in use, and how many are new.

It is not tracking you. The code is never stored together with your album link, your photos, your settings, your location or your internet address. It isn't used for advertising, and it's never shared or sold.
No cookies, and nothing from other websites. The code lives in the same place on the iPad as your other frame settings.
How long it's kept. The relay keeps each daily "seen" record for about four months, then deletes it. It keeps the code itself, with the date it first appeared, so a returning frame isn't counted as a new one.
How to remove it. Delete the Frame icon from the Home Screen and the code goes from the iPad. A new frame set up later makes a new random code, which counts as a new frame. The old code stays in the count, and it can't be linked back to you.

What Stays on Your iPad

The album link, the weather town, the time on each photo, the sleep hours and whether comments show
The saved photos and the list of what's in the album
The anonymous counting code, and the date it was last sent
The approximate location used for the weather

To remove everything the frame keeps on the iPad, delete the Frame icon from the Home Screen. iOS deletes the saved copies of the photos and the settings along with the icon. Your photos stay safe in your iCloud account. If you ran the frame in Safari instead, go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data.

Who Else the iPad Talks To

Apple, to download your photos. Apple sees the iPad's internet address, exactly as it would if you opened the album's Public Website in Safari.
Open-Meteo, a free weather service, for the temperature. The iPad sends the latitude and longitude of your town, and nothing about your album.

If you leave the weather town blank, the relay looks up your approximate city from your internet address and sends it back to the iPad. The relay doesn't keep it.

Who Runs Picture Frame

Matt Allington builds and runs Picture Frame as a free, open source project, listed on mdiwebapps.com. Picture Frame has no connection to Apple. If you have a question about privacy, use the contact form on that site.