In short: every photo tool you've used before asked you to hand over your library to use it. Confetti reads your photos where they already live, in your own Google Drive, read-only, and never takes a copy. We store the organizing layer, tags, people, album definitions, never the photos themselves.
The trade every photo tool asks you to make
You find a tool that promises to organize your wedding photos, and somewhere in the setup it asks for the same thing they all ask for: upload your library here, let us host your gallery, move your photos into our cloud and we'll take it from there. It sounds reasonable, right up until you notice what you just agreed to. Someone else now holds your only copy, on their terms, on their timeline, until they decide otherwise.
Every other option costs you something to get organized
A photographer's gallery expires. A cloud photo service organizes a copy of your library, on that service's account, not yours. A shared Drive folder with a few thousand photos in shooting order is technically yours and practically useless. Each one solves a real problem. Each one also asks you to give something up to get it.
What "read-only" means when we say it
Confetti skips that trade. It reads the photos in the one Google Drive folder you choose, read-only, meaning it can look and nothing else. It cannot create, edit, move, or delete a single file in your Drive. It cannot see anything outside that one folder. There is no step in the product where your library gets copied onto our servers, because that step was never built.
The only thing we actually keep
What Confetti stores is the work you did, not the photos themselves. Your tags, the people you named, your grandmother, the wedding party, everyone at table six, the album definitions you built, and, if you used face tagging, the numeric face data that groups people across photos. Close your account tomorrow and that layer disappears. Your photos, untouched, are still sitting exactly where you left them, in your own Drive. There was never anything to hand back, because we never took it.
The honest limitation
Google classifies this kind of read-only access as a restricted scope, which means it requires an extra third-party security review, called CASA, before every new user gets in without a warning screen. That review is in progress. It changes nothing about what Confetti can see today, and nothing about the custody model. It's a Google process, not a product limitation, and we'd rather tell you exactly where it stands than round up to "verified" before it's true.
What you get to keep
You should be able to find every photo of your grandmother, group your wedding party automatically, and build an album worth keeping, without handing your library to a stranger to do it. That constraint is where Confetti's whole design starts, not something bolted on after.
Related
- How Confetti keeps your photos private
- How to connect a Google Drive folder to Confetti
- What is AI face tagging?
If keeping your photos in your own Drive matters to you, see how the whole model works on our security page, or sign up now and connect your first folder free.