Swipe Roll privacy policy
Effective 8 November 2026
Swipe Roll is an iPhone app that helps you clean your photos and videos one month at a time and keeps a verified copy on a drive you own. This page says what happens to your information when you use it.
The short version
- Swipe Roll has no account, no servers of its own, no analytics, no ads and no tracking.
- Swipe Roll contains no outside analytics, advertising or tracking code. Its one outside library, an open-source database called GRDB, runs on your iPhone and connects to nothing.
- Swipe Roll makes no internet connection of its own.
- Your photos and videos stay on your iPhone. The only place Swipe Roll copies them is the folder or drive you choose.
- The app collects nothing about you, so we have nothing to sell, share or lose. In the App Store this shows as “Data Not Collected”.
- A swipe never deletes anything. Your iPhone asks you first, and deleted photos wait in Recently Deleted.
Where your iPhone or Apple connects for you, such as iCloud, a network drive or a purchase, this page says so.
Who is responsible
The controller, in the sense of the GDPR, is:
David D’AmicoLeopold-Böhm-Straße 2/87, 1030 Wien, Austria
support@swiperoll.app
Swipe Roll sends us nothing, so we hold no personal data from the app. The only personal data we can receive is what you choose to send us, such as an email (see “This website and your emails”).
What stays on your iPhone
Swipe Roll keeps a small amount of its own information in a private database on your iPhone and in the app’s preferences:
- Your review choices (keep, mark for deletion, favourite), stored against the ID your iPhone gives each photo, not the photo itself.
- Which months you have cleaned, and the sizes Swipe Roll measured.
- A record of what Swipe Roll deleted, and the date you said Recently Deleted was emptied.
- Backup records: which files are copied to your drive, with a checksum for each, and the link to the folder you chose.
- The records of your restore checks and of photos Swipe Roll restored.
- Where you are in the first-run tour, which Home cards you dismissed, and whether Swipe Roll has already asked you for a rating.
None of this contains your photos, and none of it leaves your iPhone. Deleting the app removes all of it. The copies on your drive stay, because they are yours.
Your photos and videos
Swipe Roll asks for access to your photos. You can change that at any time in your iPhone’s Settings.
Swipe Roll reads your photos and videos on your iPhone to show them to you, measure their size and check them against your drive. Nothing is sent anywhere.
If an original is kept only in iCloud, Apple’s Photos downloads it from your own iCloud when Swipe Roll needs the full file, for example to show it sharp, play a video, back it up or share it. That connection is made by Photos, to your own iCloud account, not by Swipe Roll.
Swipe Roll changes your photo library in three ways only:
- Delete. Photos you marked go only after you confirm in Apple’s own prompt, and they land in Recently Deleted, where your iPhone keeps them for up to 30 days. With iCloud Photos on, they also leave your other devices.
- Favourite. Swiping up adds the heart in Photos. Swipe Roll only adds hearts. It never takes one away.
- Restore. When you tap restore, Swipe Roll adds copies of photos from your drive back to Photos.
Your backup drive
You choose a folder in the Files app: on your iPhone, on a drive you plug in, or on a network drive you connected in Files. Swipe Roll copies the original files there, reads each one back and compares a checksum, so a copy is only counted when it matches. It also writes a small list of the files it copied and a short README in a folder named .clearoll.
Swipe Roll does not connect to your drive over the internet. If the folder is on a network drive, your iPhone makes that connection, between your iPhone and your own drive.
Swipe Roll does not encrypt the copies. They are ordinary photo and video files, and they keep what is inside each file, such as the date and, if your camera saved it, the place. Anyone who can open the drive can open them, so keep it as safe as you would keep the photos themselves. We cannot see your drive or what is on it.
Swipe Roll never changes or removes a file on your drive that it did not create.
Sharing
Swipe Roll shares only when you tap Share. It prepares a temporary copy of that one photo or video and opens Apple’s share sheet. You choose where it goes, and what happens after that is between you and the app or person you chose. The file can include details saved inside it, such as where it was taken. Swipe Roll deletes the temporary copy when the sheet closes.
Plans and purchases
Apple handles every purchase, through the App Store. Apple takes the payment, keeps the receipts and handles refunds, under its own terms and privacy policy.
Swipe Roll learns, on your iPhone and from Apple, only whether a plan is active, whether it is a free trial and whether it will renew. We never receive your name, your Apple Account or your payment details. In App Store Connect we can see totals such as downloads and sales, never who you are. The Terms and Privacy links on the plan screen open in your browser when you tap them.
Reminders
Swipe Roll can show two kinds of reminders: one two days before a free trial ends, and a reminder about Recently Deleted every 7 days, up to four times, until you tell Swipe Roll you emptied it. They are local notifications, scheduled on your iPhone after you allow notifications. Nothing goes through a server, and nothing about your photos is in them. You can turn them off at any time in your iPhone’s Settings.
Camera, microphone and speech
Gesture and voice are optional ways to review. Swipe Roll asks for the camera or the microphone only when you choose one of them, and explains why first. Gesture mode uses the front camera while you review. Your iPhone reads the position of your hand and your face (your nose and your eyes) on the device, to move the card and to see a gesture. No picture or video is recorded, stored or sent, and nothing about your face is kept or leaves your iPhone. Voice mode uses the microphone and speech recognition on your iPhone to hear four words (yes, no, favourite, undo); no sound or text is stored or sent. The first time, your iPhone may download Apple’s speech model for your language from Apple. You can turn camera and microphone access off at any time in your iPhone's Settings.
What Apple handles
Swipe Roll runs on your iPhone, so Apple’s own services do their usual work: the App Store, your Apple Account, iCloud if you use iCloud Photos, and the share sheet. Apple’s Privacy Policy covers them.
If you turned on Share With App Developers in your iPhone’s Privacy and Security settings, Apple may give us anonymous crash and usage reports. They do not identify you. If you test Swipe Roll through TestFlight, Apple’s TestFlight terms apply to any feedback you choose to send.
This website and your emails
This page loads no scripts, cookies, fonts or images, and it has no analytics. Like any web server, the one that serves it may keep technical data such as your IP address and browser type for a short time, to keep the site secure and working.
If you write to us, we receive your email address and what you write. We use them only to reply and to help you, and we delete them when we no longer need them to do that. We share them with no one except the email service that carries the message.
Legal basis
Swipe Roll does not process personal data on our side: it runs on your iPhone, under your control, and we get none of it. So there is nothing in the app that needs a legal basis from us. For the little we can receive, your emails and the web server’s technical data, our basis is our legitimate interest in answering you and keeping the site secure (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). We do not transfer your data to other countries, because we do not have it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to ask for access to your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to its use, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to withdraw a consent at any time. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.
In practice: what Swipe Roll keeps is on your iPhone, in your hands. Deleting the app removes it, and the files on your drive are yours to keep or delete. For anything we hold, such as an email you sent, write to us and we will answer within one month.
Children
Swipe Roll is not directed at children under 13, or under 16 in the EU. We collect no data from anyone, children included.
Changes
If we change this policy, we will publish the new version here and update the date at the top. If a change affects how your information is handled, we will say so in the release notes of the App Store update.
Contact
David D’Amico, Leopold-Böhm-Straße 2/87, 1030 Wien, Austriasupport@swiperoll.app