What Happens to Your Child's Photo When You Upload It to a Personalized Book Site

What actually happens, step by step

The mechanics are similar across almost every photo-based product, and none of it is secret.

1. The file leaves your device. It is uploaded to the company's servers, or often directly to a cloud storage bucket run by a third party such as Amazon, Google or Cloudflare.
2. It is sent to an image model. Almost nobody in this category runs their own model. The photograph is passed to a provider, which reads the face and generates an illustrated character. This means your file has usually touched at least two companies before anything appears on your screen.
3. The generated character is saved. This is the thing that matters for the book. From here the original photograph is not strictly needed any more, because the character is what gets carried through the pages.
4. The original is kept, or deleted, or neither. This is where companies genuinely differ, and it is the only step where you have any influence, by choosing who you buy from.

If you would rather test this on a company before trusting it with a real photograph of your child, you can run our preview on any photo you like, including one of yourself, and see exactly what comes back before you pay for anything. If you do not order, we keep the photo for 14 days and then delete it.

Two things follow from that list. The first is that the phrase your photo is never stored is almost always describing step four and not steps one through three, which is fine but is a narrower claim than it sounds. The second is that the model provider has its own terms, which is why a company that names its providers is telling you more than one that does not.

It also helps to separate the moments in that list by how long they last. Steps one and two take seconds. Step three produces something that may be kept for months, because it is what lets you reorder or come back to a preview. Step four is the one the privacy policy should put a number on. When you read a company's documents, try to match each sentence to one of the four steps. A lot of the vagueness in this category comes from a single sentence that sounds as if it covers all four and in fact covers one.

The one clause worth finding

If you only do one thing, do this. Open the terms of service, press control-F, and search for the word license.

What you are looking for is the content license: the paragraph in which you grant the company rights over material you upload. Some version of this clause is necessary and completely legitimate. A company cannot draw your child without permission to process the photograph, and it cannot show you the result without permission to transmit it.

The question is how far it goes. There is a standard boilerplate string that appears in an enormous number of online store terms, usually inherited from a template rather than written on purpose, and it grants a license that is irrevocable, perpetual, sublicensable and transferable. Read that plainly: permission that cannot be withdrawn, that does not expire, that can be handed to other companies, and that survives the business being sold.

Watch also for the phrase to improve our services, which in a document about uploaded content is usually the clause that permits training. If a company tells you on one page that it never trains on customer photos, and grants itself the right to use uploads to improve the services on another, those are not compatible statements.

Two smaller things are worth a glance while you are in that paragraph. First, whether the license says what it is for. A permission tied to fulfilling your order has a natural end, while one granted for any purpose does not. Second, whether it says how you withdraw it. A license you can end by asking for deletion is a different animal from one that survives your request. If the clause is silent on both, that silence is the answer.

How to read a privacy policy in four minutes

You do not have to read the whole thing. Search for five words and you will know more than most customers.

That last row is worth dwelling on. A children's product with a boilerplate minors clause is a strong signal that nobody adapted the document to the business, which in turn tells you how much thought went into the rest of it.

One practical tip for when the search finds nothing at all: check that you are reading the right document. Some shops keep an older policy at one address and a newer one at another, and the footer link is not always the current one. If the privacy policy and the terms of service describe the photo differently, write down both sentences. You will want them if you ever need to ask which one the company stands behind.

Questions to ask a company before you upload

Reading the documents tells you what a company has written down. Asking tells you something different: whether a person there knows the answer and is willing to give it plainly. You do not need to be an expert to do this. A short email with three or four direct questions is enough, and the way it gets answered is half the information.

Here are the questions worth sending, with the kind of reply that should reassure you and the kind that should make you pause.

Do not read too much into speed. A small company may take a day to reply, and that is normal. What matters is whether the reply answers the question you asked, in a sentence you could quote back to them later. If you only get marketing language, ask once more, more narrowly. A second vague answer is a real answer.

You can put the same questions to us, and you do not have to email first to see the result: the preview draws your child as a character in about a minute, with no card and no account, and the answers to those questions are in our policies and in the section on what we do, further down this page.

What a fair answer looks like

There is no perfect answer here, because the photograph genuinely has to be processed for the product to exist. A fair one has four parts.

• A retention period expressed as a number. Not indefinite, not as long as necessary. A number of days, tied to an event you understand, such as when the book ships.
• A license limited to what the work requires. Permission to process, display and print for the purpose of fulfilling your order. Not perpetual, not sublicensable, not transferable to whoever buys the company.
• An explicit no on training. Stated, not implied by silence.
• A way to ask for deletion early, and a human who answers when you do.

If you find all four, the company has thought about this. If you find none, it does not mean they are misusing anything, it means nobody has decided what happens, which over a long enough period is its own kind of answer.

It is worth adding one thing that rarely appears on anybody's list, because it is the failure that has actually hurt families in adjacent industries: what happens if the company goes under. A photograph held under a transferable license is an asset in an insolvency, in the same way a customer list is. Very few privacy policies in this category address it at all. The ones that do usually say that data is deleted or that the same commitments bind any acquirer, and either sentence tells you that somebody thought past next quarter.

What we do, and what we do not claim

We should be held to the same reading, so here it is without varnish.

We use the photograph as a reference, not as an ingredient. We look at it once to build the character, and then the character is what travels through the book. Your photograph never gets printed on a page, which is a deliberate design decision and not just a privacy one: photographic faces pasted into illustrated scenes look wrong, and we made the whole studio around drawing rather than compositing.

We delete the original thirty days after your book ships. Not archived, not anonymized. The thirty days exist because that is the window in which a reprint might be needed if something goes wrong in transit. If you want it gone sooner, write to hello@dreamtalecartoons.com and ask: you do not have to give a reason, and it does not affect a book you have already received.

We do not use your family to improve any model, ours or anybody else's, and we do not sell or license the photographs.

What our terms say, and what they do not. Since this article tells you to read the terms rather than the marketing page, here is ours held to the same standard. Our terms of service now grant one narrow permission, to use the photo to draw the character and print the book you ordered. In their words, that permission is not transferable, is not sub-licensed, and you can withdraw it at any time by asking us to delete the photo, and the photo is not sold, not published, not used in advertising, and not used to train any model. That is the clause this whole article is about, written the way we would want to find it on somebody else's site.

And it is in the contract, not just in this article. Our privacy policy names the thirty days, says what they are for, and says the photograph is never used to train a model. It also says who receives it: besides us, only the image service that draws the character, while the printer gets the finished book, never the photo. This paragraph used to warn you that the policy did not yet name a period, because a reader following the instructions in this article would have found that gap in about four minutes. The gap is closed: go and check.

The drawn character is data too

Most of the worry, understandably, goes to the photograph. But the thing a company keeps longest is usually not the photo. It is the character drawn from it, and a good likeness is recognizably your child. It deserves the same two questions: how long is it kept, and how do you get it deleted?

There are fair reasons to keep a drawn character. It lets you come back to a preview without uploading again, order a second book with the same face, or fix a typo in a dedication before the book prints. None of that is sinister. What you want is for the character to have its own stated period and its own way out, instead of living in an account forever because nobody decided otherwise.

Three things to look for:

• A separate retention rule for drawings. If the policy talks only about the photo, the character is probably being kept on no rule at all.
• What sharing does. If there is a share button, find out exactly what the link shows, whether it can be switched off, and whether it appears in search engines.
• Whether a name travels with it. A character with no name attached is much less identifying than a cover with your child's full name printed on it.

Here is how we handle it. If you only try the free preview and do not order, the photo is used to draw the character and then thrown away. What we keep is what we drew, the character and the preview covers, so you can find them again under Your drawings when you come back, and we delete them a year after they were drawn, or sooner if you write and ask. If you press Share on a drawing, we make a public link to that drawing only, not the photo and not your other drawings. A character carries no name, a cover shows the name printed on it and we tell you before you share it, the link is not listed in search engines, and Stop sharing turns it off at once.

If you want to see how much of your child a drawn character actually carries before deciding any of this, every one of our personalized books for kids starts with the same free preview: try it with a photo first and look at the result with these questions in mind.

Practical things you can do either way

Independently of who you buy from, a few of these cost nothing.

All of these apply to us as much as to anybody else, and you can test every one of them before deciding whether to trust us with a real photograph: our preview runs on any picture you like, including one that is not of your child.

• Send a photo you would be relaxed about anyway. A head and shoulders shot in ordinary clothes, taken indoors. Not the beach, not the bath, not the school uniform with the crest visible.
• Strip the location data. Most phone photos carry GPS coordinates in their metadata, which on a picture taken at home means your address. On an iPhone, use the share sheet, tap Options, and turn off Location before saving a copy. On Android, most gallery apps have a remove location option in the details view.
• Crop the background. The face is the only part the software needs. Everything else in the frame is information you did not need to send.
• Use one photo, not five. A company that asks for many photographs of a child from different angles is building something more detailed than a cartoon likeness, and it is reasonable to ask why.
• Ask for deletion when the book arrives. Even where there is no formal process, an email asking that the photograph be removed creates a record and is very often simply done.
• Upload only photos that are yours to share. If you are a grandparent, an aunt or a godparent planning a surprise, ask the parents first. It is a two minute conversation, and a photo of somebody else's child is not yours to send anywhere, however good the intention. On our site, uploading a photo of a child means you confirm that you are the parent or guardian, or that you have the parent's permission, and orders are placed by adults.
• Keep a note of what you sent and where. A line in your phone's notes with the company, the date and the photo you used makes it easy to follow up months later, when you will not otherwise remember.

If your child is old enough to understand, it is also worth simply asking them. A six or seven year old can tell you whether they like a particular picture of themselves, and being asked teaches something useful about whose face it is. It costs nothing, and it usually settles which photo to use faster than you would on your own.

None of that is paranoia. It is the same care you would take with a school photo order form, applied to a category where the file goes further.

How to ask for deletion, and what to write

Asking a company to delete a photo feels more awkward than it is. Most of the time it is one short email and one short reply. What makes it work is being specific, so that the person reading it does not have to guess what you mean or come back with questions.

A request that gets handled quickly usually contains five things:

1. The email address you used, so they can find the right record without asking.
2. The order number, or the date you uploaded if you only tried a preview.
3. Exactly what you want deleted: the original photo, the drawn character, the preview covers, or all of them. Say all of them if you are not sure.
4. A request for confirmation, in writing, once it is done.
5. Nothing else. You do not need to explain why, and a long explanation only gives the reader more to respond to.

Something as plain as this is enough: "Please delete the photo I uploaded with order number (your order number here), along with any character or preview drawn from it, and confirm by email when it is done." Keep the reply. If a company confirms deletion in writing, you have a record that the request was received and handled.

If you get no reply, send the same email once more after a few days, with the first one quoted underneath. If a company still does not answer a direct, polite request about a photograph of your child, you have learned what you needed to know about it, and that is worth remembering before you order from it again.

Is it safe to do this at all?

Our honest view, as people with an obvious interest: yes, with the checks above, and it is not the biggest exposure your child's face already has.

A typical child in the United States has their photograph in a school directory, a sports team roster, a class group chat, several relatives' social media accounts, and a cloud backup belonging to at least three adults. The marginal risk of one more upload to a company that prints books is small compared to any of those, and unlike most of them it is a company you chose, whose terms you can read, and whose retention you can ask about.

What would genuinely change that calculation is a company with no stated retention period, a perpetual content license, and a privacy policy that never mentions photographs. That combination is not rare in this category, and it is the reason this article exists rather than a paragraph in the FAQ.

If you would rather not upload anything at all, that is a completely reasonable position, and there are personalized books built entirely from menus of preset features. They will not look like your child, which is the trade, and it is a fair one to make. The four kinds are laid out in our guide to personalized books.

If you do decide to go ahead, the checks in this article fit into a few minutes: search the terms for license, search the privacy policy for photo and retain, send a photo you are relaxed about with the location removed, and ask for deletion once the book is on your shelf. For the wider question of choosing between companies, not only on privacy, our guide to choosing a personalized book company walks through the rest.

And if you would like to hold us to everything above, the simplest way is to see the preview for yourself with a photo you are comfortable with, then read our two policies with the search words from the table. We would rather be checked than trusted.