Privacy
Privacy policy
Last updated 21 October 2026.
Pixo is a picture and PDF viewer for the Mac. The short version: your pictures and documents stay on your Mac, we run no server that could see them, and every connection the app makes is listed on this page.
What the Mac app does with your data
- Your pictures, PDFs, bookmarks, boards and the search index Pixo builds stay on your Mac. They are never sent to us or to anyone else.
- There is no Pixo account. Pro is a licence key, not a login.
- Apple Intelligence and Vision run on your Mac. Questions, answers, descriptions and text read from your pictures are not sent anywhere.
- Your licence key is stored only in the macOS Keychain.
- The app contains no analytics and no advertising code, and it does not send crash reports by itself.
What the app tells us
One thing. Pixo asks our website for announcements and tells it the app's version. That request carries the app's name, its version and its build channel (for example "direct"), and nothing else. We keep one row per request: the version, the channel, the time and, when our hosting provider supplies it, the country. We do not keep an IP address, a licence key or a device id, and the request does not contain them. We use the count to know which versions are in use. It tells us how many requests each version makes, not who made them.
Every connection the Mac app makes
Anything not on this list is not contacted. List last changed 21 October 2026.
| Where | When | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing, for your pictures and PDFs | Always | Viewing, the tools, Vision and Apple Intelligence all run on your Mac. Pictures, PDFs and what is read from them are never sent anywhere by Pixo. |
| Apple Maps | The inspector shows a map for a photo with a location (it can be turned off in Settings) | A normal map request for that area, handled by macOS. The photo itself is not sent. |
| Apple (Translation and Image Playground) | Only when you choose Translate or Reimagine | Handled by macOS. Translation may download a language the first time; Image Playground works as it does in Apple's own apps. |
| Finder | You press ⌥Space for Peek | Pixo asks Finder, on your Mac, which picture is selected. macOS asks your permission once. Nothing leaves the Mac. |
| api.polar.sh (our payment provider) | Activating a Pro licence key, once at launch and once a day after, and when you choose "Deactivate This Mac" | The licence key, our organisation id at Polar, and a label for the Mac (its name and a short hash of its hardware id). Nothing about your pictures or files. |
| cdn.pixoviewer.com | At launch and once a day | Nothing. The app downloads one small file to see whether a newer version exists. |
| pixoviewer.com | At launch and every few hours, for announcements (direct-download build only) | Pixo tells our website the app's name, its version and its build channel, and nothing else: no licence key, no account and no device id. We count these requests to know how many copies of each version are in use. |
| Apple | Only in a Mac App Store build: purchases | Handled by Apple's StoreKit. A Mac App Store build does not contact Polar or ask pixoviewer.com for announcements. |
Buying Pro
Payments are handled by Polar (polar.sh), our payment provider and merchant of record. Polar collects your email address, payment details and billing country, sends you a licence key and invoices, and runs the customer portal. We do not receive your card details. We can see orders in Polar's dashboard (email address, plan, amount, country) in order to give support and refunds. When the app activates a licence it talks to Polar directly, as listed above.
This website
- The public pages load scripts from two other companies. The first is glai.io, which counts page views. It sends glai.io the page you are on, the page you came from, your screen size and language, and the links you follow to other sites, with a random visitor id kept in your browser (in local storage and a cookie named glai_vid).
- The public pages also use Google Analytics (Google LLC) to count visits and see which pages are read. It receives the page you are on, the page you came from, your browser, device, screen size and language, and an approximate place worked out from your address, and it sets its own cookies (named _ga and _ga_ followed by an id) to tell a returning visitor from a new one. The admin area never loads it. Google's own policy covers what it does with this: how Google uses information from sites that use its services. The pages set no other cookies and load no other analytics, fonts or scripts from other companies.
- When you download the app from this website, or press a buy button here, our server records that request: the IP address it came from, the country, region, city and network provider that address belongs to, your browser and operating system as your browser states them, the page you came from and any campaign tag in the link, the type of Mac and version chosen (for a download) or the plan chosen (for a buy button), and the time. A link in the app that opens a page of this website in your browser counts as a visit to the website.
- To find the place an address belongs to, our server sends the address, and nothing else, to IPinfo (ipinfo.io).
- We use these records to see how many people download and where they come from, and to spot abuse. We do not sell them or share them, and they are not linked to your pictures, your licence or the app on your Mac.
- To stop abuse, the server also limits how many requests one network address may make in a minute, using a scrambled form of the address kept in memory for about a minute.
- Like every website, ours is served by a hosting provider whose systems see the address a request comes from in order to answer it.
- If you write to us, we keep your email to answer you.
Your choices
Deleting Pixo and its folder in ~/Library/Application Support removes its data from your Mac; your pictures are never touched. To see or delete what Polar holds about a purchase, use the customer portal or write to us. To have the download and buy-button records for your IP address deleted, write to us with the address.
Changes and contact
If the app starts making a new kind of connection, it is added to the list above before that version is released, and the date at the top changes. Questions: [email protected].