Privacy: what runs in your browser and what we receive

Fix Watermark processes your files in your browser. Your photos, PDFs and videos, their names and their metadata are never uploaded. This page says exactly what runs on your device, what our server receives, and how you can check both yourself.

Last updated 27 October 2026.

What runs on your device

When you choose a file, a script on the page reads it inside your browser tab. The work is done by that script and by background workers the page starts itself:

• reading your photos, PDFs and videos, and their metadata;
• drawing the text or logo mark and showing the live preview;
• encoding the results: JPEG, PNG and WebP images, marked PDFs, and MP4 or WebM video;
• writing copyright metadata into photo files;
• building ZIP files and saving into a folder you pick.

Your browser saves the results as downloads or into a folder you choose. None of this reaches us: not your files, not their names or metadata, not the text or logo of your mark, and not your presets.

What is stored on your device

Two things: your presets, and your Pro licence if you buy one. Both stay in your browser's storage on that device and nowhere else. Clearing a site's data in your browser deletes them. Safari also deletes the data a site stores through scripts after seven days of Safari use without a visit to that site, according to WebKit's documentation, and web apps added to the Home Screen are exempt. That is why Pro gives you a licence file to keep, and why presets can be exported.

While Pro is being activated after you pay, there is one more: the page keeps the Stripe checkout session id in your tab's session storage until your licence has arrived, so that reloading the page does not lose it. Closing the tab clears it.

The two requests our server receives

Only the Pro pages talk to our server, beyond loading the page itself. Neither request carries a file, a file name or any metadata, and neither is made while you process files.

As soon as the page loads, it replaces the address in your address bar with one that has no session id. The cookie holds a random secret that only your browser has. It lasts 24 hours, and we keep a one-way hash of the secret for the same time. We hand a licence only to the browser whose cookie matches, so that a person who sees the session id cannot collect it. The licence token holds the plan (pro), your checkout session id and the date it was issued. It holds no name and no email address, and your browser checks its signature on your device.

To limit abuse, our server counts requests to these two addresses per hour, using a short one-way hash of your IP address that is kept for two hours. The address itself is not stored or written to our logs, and our logs never contain session ids, cookies or tokens. Opening a licence file on the restore page sends nothing to our server.

Payments and hosting

Pro is paid on Stripe's hosted checkout page, which is a separate site; see Stripe's privacy policy. We never see your card details. Stripe tells our server that a payment succeeded, with the checkout session id, and we store a licence record: the session id, the plan, the date and a one-way hash of your email address. We can also see your email address and receipt in our Stripe account, which is how we handle refunds and lost licence files.

Our site is served by Cloudflare, which, like any web host, handles the IP address and technical details of each request in order to deliver the page. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cookies, analytics and other sites

We run no analytics and no advertising. We load no scripts, fonts, images or video from other websites. The only cookie our code sets is the checkout cookie above. Every page is served with a Content Security Policy, which tells your browser to refuse connections to any website except ours, and with a header that tells it not to send a referrer when you follow a link.

Colour and metadata in your results

Colour

Marks are drawn on a canvas that works in sRGB. For watermarked photos, the colours of a photo in another colour space, such as Display P3, are converted to sRGB, the original colour profile is not copied into the result, and the most saturated colours can shift slightly. The copyright metadata tool converts nothing: your pixels and any colour profile in the file stay exactly as they were.

Metadata

This is how metadata is handled in watermarked photos. Camera and copyright metadata are kept; maker notes, thumbnails and colour profiles are not. Maker notes are camera-specific settings that some manufacturers store. They hold internal references that would break when the metadata is rewritten, so we do not carry them over. A thumbnail is a small preview stored inside the file. It would show the picture as it was before the mark, so we do not carry that over either. GPS location data is left out of the saved copy by default, and you can switch that off. We set the EXIF Software field to Fix Watermark, and we never write a thumbnail or GPS coordinates of our own.

The copyright metadata tool changes only the metadata. It never touches your pixels or your colour profile, and it rewrites the EXIF block only when it has something to change there. When it does, maker notes and thumbnails are not carried over either.

Credit: the attribution rule

We never overwrite someone else's credit. Before applying your copyright profile to a file, we read the creator and copyright already inside it. If the file names a different creator or copyright holder, we keep what the file says, add only the profile fields that were empty, still apply the watermark, and show a notice in the file list. Missing credit is filled in. You can replace an existing credit only by ticking an override box for that run, and presets never store it.

How to check it yourself

1. Open one of the tools, then open your browser's developer tools and choose the Network tab.
2. Clear the list, add a photo, set a mark and download the result.
3. Look through the requests. You will see this site's own page, script, font and image files loading. You will not see a request that carries your photo, its name or its metadata.
4. Click the page's own request and read its response headers. The Content Security Policy is there.

Contact

Email hello@fixwatermark.com with any question about privacy, or to ask what we hold about a purchase.