Grain Studio
Privacy policy
Effective 9 September 2026 · updated 29 September 2026 for version 1.7
What Grain Studio collects
Nothing. Grain Studio runs entirely on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. It has no account, no analytics, no crash reporter of its own, and it does not connect to the internet except through Apple's StoreKit framework to handle the free trial and the unlock purchase. Your photographs are read from the files or library items you choose and written to the album or folder you choose; they are never uploaded anywhere.
Purchases
The trial and the unlock are processed by Apple through the App Store under Apple's terms, as one purchase for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Grain Studio receives a signed confirmation that the purchase exists; it never sees your payment details.
Photos
On iPhone and iPad, the photos you pick come through the system picker, which shares just those items with the app. The first time it saves a finished photo, the app asks for access to your library so it can put its files in a “Grain Studio” folder with an album for each kind of file. It reads nothing else in your library and never changes or deletes anything in it. If you allow limited access or only adding, your files go to Recents and to the app's own folder instead. On the Mac, adding finished files to Photos is off until you turn it on, and macOS asks for permission then. Photos you share to Grain Studio from another app are copied into the app's own storage on your device. A Live Activity and a notification can show your progress on the Lock Screen; they are created on your device and nothing is sent anywhere.
Files and folders
Grain Studio is sandboxed on every platform. On iPhone and iPad it writes to its own folder, shown in Files as On My iPhone → Grain Studio. On the Mac it can read the photos you open or drop onto it, write to the output folder you select (by default Pictures / Grain), and move an original AVIF to the Trash when you have asked it to. A cache of grain plates is kept in the app's own container so later photos process faster; deleting the app removes it.
Logs
A processing log is kept inside the app's container to help you diagnose problems. It is never sent anywhere unless you choose to share it.