In short: your photos never leave your own Google Drive. Confetti asks Google only for read-only permission to the folder you choose. It never modifies your Drive, never takes a copy of your photo library, and closing your account removes what Confetti stored.
Where do my photos actually live?
In your own Google Drive, the whole time. Confetti is a layer that reads your photos to organize and display them. The albums you build are stored as definitions inside Confetti and viewed through the app; Confetti does not write anything back to your Drive. At no point does a full copy of your photo library get uploaded to or stored on Confetti's servers.
What permission does Confetti actually ask for?
Confetti runs today on a single, read-only Google Drive permission ("scope"):
- Read-only access to the folder you pick so Confetti can display, organize, and face-tag the photos in it. This does not let Confetti see your whole Drive, only the folder you connect, and it does not let Confetti create, modify, or delete anything in your Drive.
Because that live scope is read-only, Confetti cannot write to your Drive at all. (Google offers a separate drive.file scope that would let an app manage only the files it creates itself; Confetti does not use that scope today.)
What does Confetti actually store on its own servers?
The organizing layer: tags, the people you've named, album definitions, and (if you use face tagging) numeric face data used to group people across photos. It does not store a duplicate copy of your photo library. See how face tagging works for more on the face-data specifics.
Is this Google-verified?
Confetti's use of Google Drive data follows Google's API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements: your data is used only to provide the features you asked for, never sold, never used for advertising, and never used to train AI models. Because the read-only Drive scope is a "restricted" scope in Google's classification, it requires an additional third-party security assessment (CASA) before Google fully clears it for a public launch; that assessment is in progress. This does not affect what data Confetti can access today, it affects when the "unverified app" warning goes away for new users during sign-in.
What happens to my data if I close my account?
Your photos were never in Confetti's custody, so there is nothing to return, they stay exactly where they were, in your Google Drive. Closing your account removes the metadata Confetti stored (tags, people, album definitions, and face data) from Confetti's systems.
Who can see my photos besides me?
Only people you explicitly share with, via a share link or an invite you send. Confetti does not make any gallery public by default, and no one browses your photos without your action.