How face recognition can actually stay private, explained for photographers and couples

We get this question a lot, and it is a fair one. If a guest uploads a selfie and the system matches faces, what actually happens to that photo? Is the whole album floating around somewhere? Since the people asking are usually photographers and couples who have to explain this to their guests, here is how it works.

Each guest sees only their own photos. When someone uploads a selfie, the system matches it against the album and shows them the pictures they appear in. Nobody else's photos come up. There is no public gallery, no browse everything view, and the album is never indexed by search engines.

The selfie is used for one thing: finding that person's photos. It is not shared with anyone else and it is not part of some wider face database used somewhere else.

Guests have to opt in. Before they go any further they tick a box saying they consent to facial recognition being used to find their photos. It is a clear step, not buried in fine print.

You can block anyone. If there is a guest you do not want getting matches, you block their phone number or email in the album's access settings, and they stop getting matches entirely.

On the tech side, faces are stored as non reversible embeddings rather than as photos you could open and browse. It is a nerdy detail, but it is the reason face search can work without keeping a folder of recognisable face images lying around.

If that sounds like what you would want for your own event, that is what we set out to build. And if a guest feels uneasy about the selfie step, it usually comes down to three points: it is opt in, it is used only to find their own photo, and they only ever see photos of themselves.