Privacy

Last updated: November 2, 2026

This page explains, in plain language, what information Phylodex works with and where it goes. Phylodex is operated by Davis Franklin LLC. The public site is phylodex.com.

Wildlife photos and videos you upload. You store photos, videos, and their embedded metadata (including EXIF data such as capture date, camera settings, and GPS coordinates) in your archive. You control what stays private and what you publish. Treat uploads as sensitive: they can reveal the locations, dates, and species of your sightings.

Account information. To run the service we process information tied to your account — your sign-in email and any profile details you provide. We use this to operate the product, keep your account secure, and contact you about the service when needed. Sign-in is by email and password; we do not use third-party social logins.

AI identification and cropping. Phylodex uses Google's Gemini models (Gemini Pro and Gemini Flash). Most of this runs only when you ask for it: species suggestions in Review; the background suggestion pass, which you start, and which stops by itself once every waiting photo has a suggestion (along the way it asks Gemini Flash to double-check confident suggestions and to find the animal or plant in those photos); and crop suggestions for Folio pages. For these, Phylodex sends Google a copy of the photo itself, sometimes cropped to the animal or plant. For species suggestions it also sends the general place the photo was taken (a place name, not GPS coordinates), the season, and a list of species known from that region.

One step runs without your asking. Once a photo has a species, Phylodex automatically sends it to Gemini to find where the animal is, for cropping. That is how species tiles, collection covers and shared pages keep the animal in frame. It asks Gemini Flash once per photo, and sends only the photo's display copy, which has had its location and camera data removed at upload: no place, date, species or account details. The answer, a box around the subject, is kept with your photo. Nothing is sent when you upload. From time to time Phylodex also runs this step over the other photos shown in your Phylodex (not archived) that it hasn't asked about yet, with or without a species. We do not send your name, email, or account identity to Google for any of these features.

Phylodex uses Gemini as a paid Google service. Under Google's terms for paid use, Google does not use what we send, or what Gemini sends back, to train or improve its models. Google keeps it for up to 55 days to detect misuse and meet legal requirements; during that time, authorized Google staff may review anything flagged for misuse.

Location lookups. To show a place name for a photo's GPS position, in Review and as context for species suggestions, Phylodex sends the coordinates (latitude and longitude) to Mapbox. For the place name a photo gets when you identify it, they are rounded to about a kilometre first. No image content or account identity is sent to Mapbox.

iNaturalist links. If you link a photo to an iNaturalist observation, Phylodex asks iNaturalist's public service about that observation, sending only its observation number. We keep the community identification, the quality grade, and when we last checked — no iNaturalist photos — and check again from time to time, because community identifications change. If the photo is in a public collection and iNaturalist's community agrees with your identification, the collection shows a “Research Grade on iNaturalist” badge linking to the observation, where your iNaturalist profile is visible.

Field guide print files. When you export a field guide's print files (a Pro feature), Phylodex builds them on its own servers from your original photos and stores the finished file privately with Supabase. Download links work for an hour, and the file is deleted after seven days (the working files of an export that failed, after one day). These are files you download; Phylodex does not send them anywhere. Ordering a Folio is different, below.

Folio orders. The Phylodex Folio is a field guide printed and bound as a hardcover. You pay for it on Stripe's own checkout page. Stripe collects your email, the name and address the Folio ships to (for a gift, the recipient's), any gift message for the card, and, when your payment method or sales tax needs it, your billing address. For a Folio you order for yourself, Stripe saves the shipping address to your Stripe customer record so your next checkout can fill it in; a gift recipient's address is never saved there. From Stripe, Phylodex keeps your email, the name and address the Folio ships to, the gift message, and what you paid. Folios ship within the United States only.

The printer. Folios are printed by Bay Photo Lab. Phylodex builds each Folio's print files on its own servers: the cover and every page, with your photos, captions, and any dedication you wrote. We place the order with Bay Photo by hand, giving it those files, the name and address the Folio ships to, and, for a gift, the message for the card. Bay Photo prints the Folio and ships it directly, so the shipping carrier also receives the name and address. Bay Photo does not receive your email address or payment details.

Email. Phylodex's emails are sent through Resend: the sign-up confirmation and password-reset emails, the order emails (a confirmation when you pay and a notice when your Folio ships), the confirmation when you subscribe to Pro, and a note when background suggestions you queued are ready. Resend receives your email address and the content of each email. For order emails that means the guide's title, what you ordered and paid, the name and address it ships to, and tracking details. Phylodex also sends itself a notice of each new order through Resend. A gift recipient's email address is never collected, and the gift message never goes into an email.

How long order information is kept. Order records (what was ordered and paid, where it shipped, and each step of the order) are kept as Phylodex's record of the sale and are not deleted automatically. An order's print files are stored privately with Supabase while the Folio is being made and shipped. Once it is delivered they are kept 90 days in case it needs reprinting, then deleted; if a delivery is never recorded, they are deleted 120 days after it ships. If an order is canceled, its print files are deleted straight away.

Hosting and storage. Your data — account info, uploaded photos and videos, sightings, species records, and collections — is stored with Supabase (database and file storage) and served through Vercel (application hosting). Vercel necessarily receives standard request data such as IP addresses and browser headers.

Backups. So that a failure can't lose your archive, Phylodex keeps a private, encrypted backup with Backblaze B2. Every night it copies the original photos and videos you upload, and the print files of book orders. Twice a week it backs up the database (your account, sightings, species records, collections and orders), encrypted before it leaves Phylodex so that Backblaze cannot read it. Backups are used only to restore Phylodex after a failure. When a photo or an order's print files are deleted from Phylodex, the backup copy is kept 30 days and deleted within 32. Each database backup is deleted about eight weeks after it is made, so information you delete can remain in database backups for up to nine weeks. Backups aren't deleted sooner on request: a new backup is locked so that no one, including Phylodex, can delete it during its first 30 days (a database backup, during its eight weeks).

Billing. Paid plans are processed through Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe's own checkout page, and Stripe receives the billing details needed to complete charges and manage your subscription. Stripe also asks for the billing address sales tax needs (in the United States, the full address, because local tax rates depend on it) and saves it to your Stripe customer record, so renewals are taxed correctly. Folio orders are paid through Stripe the same way. We do not store full payment card numbers on Phylodex servers.

Error monitoring. We use Sentry to capture errors and a sample of performance data so we can fix problems. Session recording is turned off. Error reports may include the page path involved, which can contain an account identifier.

Product analytics. We use PostHog (its United States service) to count how Phylodex is used, so we can see what works: sign-ups, uploads started and finished, grouped reviews confirmed, field guides created, and checkouts for Pro and for Folios, started and completed. Each event carries your Phylodex account ID (a random identifier, not your email or name) and a few numbers — how many files an upload had, or a checkout's amount and currency. Events never include your photos, file names, species, places, or GPS coordinates. They are sent from Phylodex's servers, not from your browser, so PostHog does not receive your IP address, and it sets no cookies. Session recording is not used. If you arrive from a link that names a campaign (its utm_source and utm_campaign labels), Phylodex keeps just those two labels in a cookie of its own for 30 days and adds them to your sign-up, Pro upgrade and Folio checkout events and to the Stripe payment, so we can tell which campaigns bring people to Phylodex.

Species reference data. To build regional species checklists, Phylodex sends only region codes (for example, “US-CA”) to eBird. To write the natural-history text in field guides, it looks up species articles on Wikipedia and has Gemini summarize them. Only species names are sent, never personal information or photos, and none of this happens during normal use of your archive.

What we don't do. We do not sell your data, and we do not use advertising trackers. Analytics is limited to the PostHog events described above.

Your control and deletion. You decide what to publish and what stays private. To request access to or deletion of your data, email support@phylodex.com. Deleting your account deletes your photos, Folios, profile, and everything else in it, your Stripe customer record with its saved cards and address, and your analytics history in PostHog (PostHog removes the events within about a week). A Pro subscription ends at once when the account is deleted. If you ordered a Folio, we keep that order's payment record (what you bought and paid, the dates, and the state and postal code it shipped to) for accounting and sales tax, without your name, email, street address, or photos; Stripe keeps its own record of the payment. An account can't be deleted while one of its Folio orders is still being paid for, made, printed, or shipped; we'll delete it once the order arrives, or cancel and refund the order first if it hasn't reached the printer. Copies in our backups are removed as the backups expire, within about two months.

Changes. We may update this policy as the product evolves; we'll note the “last updated” date above.