What happens to your photo after you upload it
A straight answer for this site, and a comparison of what the other background removers actually put in writing.
On this site: your upload and the result are deleted within 30 minutes, automatically. You can delete both immediately with one button on the result page. There is no account, no email address and no payment step, so there is no profile for the image to attach itself to. Your photos are never used to train a model.
What the other tools say, in their own words
The interesting finding is not that one service is slower than another. It is that most of them do not publish a number at all. Below is what each company states in a public document, checked on August 23, 2026. Where the wording is vague, it is quoted as is rather than converted into a number we cannot support.
| Service | What the public document says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| This site | Deleted within 30 minutes, automatically, plus a delete button. No account. | Privacy policy |
| remove.bg | "Deleted typically within 60 minutes" on the company blog. The privacy policy itself says only "delete them shortly after". | Policy, blog |
| Clipdrop | "When you have not created your account: images, photographs and texts are retained during two year." | Policy |
| Pixelcut | "Automatically deleted within 24 hours" for images sent through the API. No published figure for the website. | Docs |
| Photoroom | API images are "discarded immediately after the response". For the app, the retention table says "duration of use of services", and an account is kept up to two years after your last login. | Policy |
| Fotor | Stored "until you decide to delete it"; "the retention time of your input equals to the term of your account existence". | Policy |
| Picsart | "We retain your information until you delete your account", and up to three years after an account is terminated. | Policy |
| Canva | No figure published. Content is kept "for a commercially reasonable time" after an account closes. | Policy |
| Slazzer | No figure published: "delete them shortly after". Face data specifically is "deleted immediately after processing". | Policy |
| erase.bg | No figure published: data is kept "for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes". The site also states "your images are anonymously stored with us". | Policy |
Quotations are from each company's own public pages, checked on August 23, 2026. Policies change without notice, so treat this as a snapshot and follow the source links before you rely on it. Adobe Express is missing from the table because we could not open Adobe's policy to verify it, and a guess would defeat the point of the page.
Two patterns worth noticing
The first is that a short deletion window and an account are close to mutually exclusive. Services built around a library of your projects keep the files as long as the account exists, because that is the product: your uploads are supposed to still be there next week. That is a reasonable design, and it means the answer to "when is my photo deleted" is "when you delete it, if you remember to".
The second is that a published number is rare. Eight of the ten services above describe retention in words rather than in hours, and the two clearest numbers, from Pixelcut and Photoroom, describe their API rather than the website most people use. A precise figure is easy to write and hard to walk back, which is presumably why it is avoided.
What this site does see
Deleting your image is not the same thing as knowing nothing about you, and claiming otherwise while running ads would be dishonest. Here is the complete list.
- Web server logs. The reverse proxy in front of the app records requests in the ordinary way, including IP address, timestamp and user agent. This is standard operational logging, not a profile of you.
- Cloudflare. The site sits behind Cloudflare, so requests pass through its network and are subject to its own logging and security processing.
- Google Tag Manager and Google AdSense. Neither is loaded until you press Accept in the cookie bar. If you press Decline, or ignore it, no analytics or advertising script runs at all. If you accept, these services can set cookies in the usual way.
- A random session id. Each job gets a random identifier that appears in the URL of the result page. It is not tied to you, and it stops resolving once the files are deleted.
What is not on the list matters too: no account, no email address, no upload history, and no use of your images for training.
When you should not use an online tool at all
There are files that should never be uploaded to a free web service, this one included. If your image is a medical scan or anything covered by patient confidentiality, a passport or ID document, a contract or anything under a non disclosure agreement, or a photo of another person who has not agreed to it being processed, then the right tool is one that runs on your own machine.
The offline option is genuinely available: the model behind this site is the open source rembg project, and it can be installed and run locally with no network access at all. That advice costs us a visitor, and it is still the correct advice.
Questions people actually ask
- How long do you keep my photo?
- Both the upload and the finished PNG are deleted from the server within 30 minutes. A cleanup job runs continuously and removes anything older than that, and the Delete my photo now button on the result page removes both files immediately.
- Do you use my images to train a model?
- No. The model here is a pretrained open source model called isnet-general-use, it runs as it was published, and nothing you upload is added to a training set. There is no mechanism in this service that could feed images back into training.
- Do you need an account or my email address?
- No. There is no sign up, no email field and no payment step anywhere in the flow. A job is identified by a random session id in the URL, and that id is the only thing linking you to your image.
- Is this safe for confidential documents or medical images?
- No online tool is the right answer for those. Anything covered by medical confidentiality, a non disclosure agreement, or data protection rules for identity documents should be processed on a machine you control, with an offline tool. That advice costs us a visitor and it is still the correct advice.
The formal version of all this is in the privacy policy. If you just want the tool: remove a background without creating an account.