Private

Your pictures, videos and libraries stay on your Mac. Here is everything Anarchive does with the internet, so you can see for yourself.

What stays on your Mac

Everything. Your pictures, videos and libraries, your edits, captions, keywords and faces, and everything Anarchive makes from them are stored and processed on your Mac. Every model it uses runs there too: its own models and Apple’s on-device models. The app itself has no permission from macOS to open a network connection; the two small helpers that can are described below, and each does one thing.

The one thing it does by itself

Once a day, Anarchive asks dl.getanarchive.com whether there is a newer beta. That request carries the app’s name and version and, like any internet request, your IP address. It carries nothing about your Mac or your library. If there is a newer beta, Anarchive offers it, and nothing downloads or installs until you say so.

To switch the daily check off, go to Settings › General and turn off Check for updates automatically. Anarchive › Check for Updates… still works whenever you choose.

Only when you ask

Your own originals from iCloud. If you use Photos as a source and Photos keeps your originals in iCloud, Photos may download them when Anarchive needs them. Nothing is uploaded. This is on to begin with; Settings › Photos & Sharing › Download from iCloud when needed switches it off.
Optional models. A few features offer a model to download: object selection, depth, sky and the like. Nothing is fetched until you press Download in Settings › Models, from the address shown before you do, with no cookies or sign-in. Apple’s speech model for transcripts comes from Apple the same way. Once downloaded, a model runs on your Mac.
Add to Photos and Share. What you choose goes where you send it. If your Photos library syncs with iCloud, that is Photos doing what it does.
Agent access. Off to begin with. If you turn it on in Settings › Agents, an AI agent you connect, such as Claude Desktop or Claude Code, can search a library and read what Anarchive knows about its items, and that agent sends what it reads to its own provider, under that provider’s terms. Anarchive asks you the first time an agent uses a library, keeps pictures and sensitive details off unless you allow them, and keeps a log of what each agent did.

Maps never go online: the grouping map and Set Location draw a chart and place names that ship inside the app.

No account, no analytics, no cloud

Anarchive has no account to make and no server of its own. It collects no analytics and sends no crash or usage reports. Nothing from your library leaves your Mac unless you send it somewhere.

This site

getanarchive.com is a few static pages served by Cloudflare, and the beta downloads come from dl.getanarchive.com, also on Cloudflare. The pages have no analytics and set no cookies, and the typeface is served from the site itself, so a visit makes no request to anyone else. Cloudflare adds one small script of its own that hides the feedback address from spam harvesters, and as the host it sees each request, as any host does, under its own privacy policy.

Feedback

Email to [email protected] reaches the developer. Reports on GitHub are public. Either way, please don’t send original pictures, videos or anything private unless you are asked for something specific. Nothing from your library is sent unless you attach it.

Contact

Anarchive is made by Doug Cain. Questions about any of this: [email protected].