Privacy Policy

Your photograph never leaves your browser. There is no upload step, because there is nowhere for it to be uploaded to.

Your photographs

Everything PicToBead does to an image — decoding it, cropping it, resampling it, reducing its colours, matching those colours to beads — happens in your browser using your own device. The image is held in memory while you work and discarded when you close or reload the page. It is never transmitted to us or to anyone else, and we never see it.

Saved pattern files are written to your own device by your browser. They contain the chart, the palette and the settings — deliberately not the original photograph, so a saved pattern can be shared without sharing your picture.

Cookies and storage

PicToBead sets no cookies at all, and writes nothing to local storage, session storage or IndexedDB. That covers the advertising script described below as well as the pattern tools themselves: it stores nothing on your device, and it is sent no cookies when it fetches an advert. There is no sign-in, no account and no profile, so there is nothing about you for us to store.

Analytics

There is no analytics package and no tag manager. Nothing here measures or reports what you do with the site — not which photograph you chose, which settings you picked, or whether you exported anything. The one thing reported off the page is whether the advert was actually on screen, described next.

Server logs

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which like any web host records routine request information such as IP address, timestamp and user agent in order to serve pages and protect against abuse. We do not combine those logs with anything else or use them to build a profile of you.

Advertising

PicToBead carries one advert, served by AppRing. It sits beside the legend on the pattern screen, in a fixed place chosen by us, and it is the only one: nothing is injected automatically, and the upload and setup screens carry no advertising at all. Nothing is requested from the advertising network until you reach the pattern screen, so simply visiting the site contacts nobody. Google AdSense is no longer loaded here.

The advert is plain text — an emoji, a headline, a line or two, and a link. There is no image, no iframe and no tag of its own inside it, so it cannot load anything further or watch the page around it.

To fill the slot, the page asks api.appr.ing for an advert. That request carries no cookies and nothing identifying; like any request to any server, it does reveal your IP address, your browser’s user agent and the page you were on. Once the advert has been at least half on screen for a second, the page sends AppRing a short note saying so, so that an advertiser is billed for adverts people actually saw. That note says only which advert was shown. It is the only thing this site sends anywhere about your visit.

The advert is not personalised. Nothing about you is sent, nothing is stored on your device, and nothing here builds a profile of you.

Block it with any content blocker if you would rather not have it — or if the network is simply unreachable, which comes to the same thing. The slot collapses to nothing and the pattern tools work identically, because they never depended on it.

Children

The site is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If this policy changes, the revised version will appear on this page. Questions are welcome at [email protected].

Last updated September 2026.