Lynceus · Privacy
Your images never leave your Mac. Here is the whole policy, in plain language.
The short version: the Mac App Store build works completely offline, with no accounts, analytics, or third-party SDKs, and it cannot make network requests at all. You choose which folders it can read, and you can take that access back whenever you like.
The details
01
Lynceus stores local information needed to run your library: folder choices, image thumbnails, search embeddings, tags, notes, settings, and the search index. Your original image files stay where they are. Lynceus reads them from the folders you choose and does not move or edit them.
02
Lynceus reads the folders you select, creates local thumbnails and search data from their images, and saves the tags, notes, and preferences you enter. It uses this information only to display your library and provide browsing, filtering, similar-image search, and natural-language search on your Mac.
03
Lynceus does not send your images, searches, tags, notes, or settings to a server. It has no account system, analytics, crash reporter, advertising SDK, or other third-party SDK. Your local library data is not shared with anyone.
04
The Mac App Store version includes its AI models inside the app and has no network-client entitlement. macOS prevents it from making network requests. Development builds can download missing model files from huggingface.co during first-launch setup. That download contains model files only, not your images or library data.
05
Lynceus can only read folders you choose in the macOS file picker. The app uses read-only, security-scoped access for those folders. Remove a folder from Settings to stop using it and release that access.
06
Your local data stays on your Mac until you remove it. Removing a folder deletes that folder’s indexed entries and cached thumbnails, but leaves the original files alone. To remove all Lynceus data, delete ~/Library/Application Support/com.capataina.lynceus/ and uninstall the app.
07
If Lynceus’s data practices change, this page will be updated and the date above will change too.
Privacy questions
Email ata02caner@gmail.com and I’ll reply directly. For help using the app, see Support and FAQ.