About PolishPic
How PolishPic works, and why we built it this way.
Your photos stay on your device
Local-first processing
We built PolishPic because we didn't want to upload our own photos to edit them. Your files stay on your computer — the app has no servers handling image data for standard edits, so there's nothing to breach, leak, or train a model on, because we never receive them.
Sign in later to sync presets and settings across machines. You pick what leaves the device, and when.
Enough to make the app reliable on your hardware, and nothing about the contents of your photos. Image pixels and filenames never leave the browser unless you use a cloud feature.
- File metadata (type, dimensions, size) — not pixels
- Hardware class (CPU/GPU) and browser version
- Anonymous usage patterns and error reports
- Account settings and sync state (when signed in)
We don't sell data. When a feature needs to send something to the cloud, we tell you first.
Standard edits run locally. A few features — upscaling, background removal, pipeline suggestions — need a cloud model to work.
- You opt in per use. We ask before sending anything, and you see which feature is about to send it.
- No storage on our side. Images move through our proxy to the AI provider and back; we don't keep them after the response returns.
Two reasons — one benefits you, one benefits us, and they line up.
- Faster for you. No upload, no queue, no server round-trip. A 24 MP photo opens as quickly as your browser can decode the file.
- Cheaper for us. We don't run an image warehouse, so we can spend that budget on building the editor instead of on S3 bills and retention policies.
The editor can't reach outside the browser
WebAssembly, running in the browser's sandbox
The image engine ships as a WebAssembly module. That means it runs inside your browser's sandbox the same way any web page does — it can't read your filesystem, install anything, or reach the network on its own.
No third-party trackers or analytics pixels sit on top of your photos. When you export a file, it goes where you send it and nowhere else.
No upload wait, no server queue
Rust + WASM image engine
Most web editors upload your photo, queue it behind other users, and send back a preview. PolishPic skips all of that. The engine is written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly, and runs on your CPU — so the round-trip is you pressing a button and the result appearing.
A 24 MP JPEG opens in under a second on a 2019 laptop. Exports are written straight to your disk when you save.
Free for daily edits; paid for AI and scale
The expensive things sit behind a tier
Crop, adjust, resize, and export — free, no account needed, no watermark. Open the editor and work.
AI-assisted edits and batch runs at volume live in paid tiers, because those cost us real money (cloud inference, not servers storing your images).
An image workflow built for the AI era
Direct the edit; it sequences the steps
Older editors were built around manual tools and plugin marketplaces. Newer ones push your files to a cloud pipeline you don't control. PolishPic is neither. Describe the edit you want — "match the colors in these three photos", "prep this for a 16×20 print", "remove the background across this folder" — and the app assembles a pipeline you can review, tweak, and run. Batches execute on your machine; prompts go to an AI model; your pixels stay with you.
Not every edit needs an AI model, and the ones that do shouldn't cost you a copy of your photo library. That's the bet.