How Storywish Handles Your Child's Photo

Exactly what happens when you upload a photo to Storywish: how it becomes a character, why the original is not kept, and why it is never used to train AI models.

By Justin Ponczek and Seth Gold, Storywish cofounders · Last updated July 20, 2026

Uploading a photo of your child to an app is an act of trust. This page explains, step by step, what Storywish does with that photo, in enough detail that you can hold us to it.

What happens when you upload a photo

You upload a photo to create a character. A clear picture of a face works best. A sketch or a written description works too, and neither of those involves a photo at all.
The photo becomes a written description. Our system looks at the image and writes down text characteristics: hair color and style, eye color, skin tone, clothing, that sort of thing. This is the character's recipe.
Illustrations are drawn from the description. Your character's portrait, and every page they appear on, is created fresh from that written recipe together with your chosen art style. The artwork is a new drawing, generated from scratch.
The original photo is deleted. Once the character exists, the photo has done its job. We do not keep it, and it is never used to train AI models, ours or anyone else's.

What we keep, and who controls it

What remains in your account is what you made: your characters, their generated portraits, and your stories. That content belongs to you. You can delete any character or story at any time from the app, and deleting your account removes your data.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for marketing. Running Storywish does involve a small set of infrastructure vendors, for things like hosting, payments, and the AI models themselves. Every one of them is listed in the sub-processor table of our Parents Trust Center, and each is bound by a data processing agreement. We commit to emailing users before adding a vendor that materially changes how data flows.

Security, in plain terms

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, on modern cloud infrastructure.
Access to user data is limited to authorized people, for support and reliability work.
We run routine security reviews and apply updates promptly. Security researchers can reach us through the contact listed at storywish.ai/security.

Questions we hope you ask

Why should I believe the photo is deleted? Because we put it in writing, here and in our Privacy Policy, where it is enforceable. It is also how the product works: illustrations are generated from the text description, so keeping the photo would serve no purpose.

Does my child's likeness end up in a model somewhere? No. Neither the photo nor the generated character art is used for model training.

Can I use Storywish without uploading a photo at all? Yes. Characters can be made from a sketch or a plain description, and plenty of families make invented characters, pets included.

Anything this page does not answer, ask a person: seth@storywish.ai.