Privacy Policy

Effective 30 October 2026

Showpiece has no accounts, no ads and no tracking. Your own photos stay on your phone and your TV. App usage is recorded anonymously, to help improve the art catalog.

What the app uses, and why

• Your photos: to list the ones large enough for a 4K crop, so you can choose one, and to show a folder of them on your TV as a slideshow. They are read on your phone and never uploaded. If you would rather not allow this, you can pick a single photo through your phone’s own photo picker instead.
• Your local network: to find a Samsung Frame TV on your Wi-Fi and send pictures to it, and to find TVs you can cast to, including ones running the Showpiece TV app.
• Notifications (Android): the slideshow’s media controls, shown while it plays on your TV, with a way to stop it. Android shows these without asking for notification permission.
• The internet: to search the art catalog and load pictures from the museums and libraries that publish them.

You are asked for photos the first time they are needed, and you can change your mind at any time in your phone’s settings.

Your photos

A photo you crop goes only where you send it: to your Frame TV over your own Wi-Fi, to a TV you are casting to, straight from your phone over the Cast connection, to your gallery when you save it, or to another app when you share it. It is never uploaded to me or to any server.

When you play a folder of your photos as a slideshow on your TV, they go the same way: straight from your phone to the TV over your own Wi-Fi. On iPhone with AirPlay, your phone makes the photos into a video, and the TV plays it from your phone. On Android, the phone sends each photo in turn, over Google Cast, to the Showpiece TV app, or to a TV that accepts pictures from phones on its network. Your photos never pass through Showpiece’s servers.

Browsing the art

Searches go to Showpiece’s catalog so it can find matching works. What you search for is recorded, as described below, so avoid typing anything personal into the search box.

The pictures load from the institutions and services that publish them, among them the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, NASA and Unsplash, where some museums also publish their collections. Portraits of artists load from Wikimedia Commons. Like any website, they see your device’s internet address when it asks them for a picture.

When you send an Unsplash photograph to your TV, the app tells Unsplash that it was used, as Unsplash requires. That message says which photograph, not who you are.

What is recorded

App usage is recorded anonymously. Each record carries an ID that the app makes up when it is installed, so activity can be counted, but the ID is not linked to your name, email address, phone or any account, and nothing is recorded that says who you are.

When you send a piece from the catalog to your TV, cast it, share it or save it, the app records which piece, how it was used, and when. These records are used for app analytics: to see which art people put on their walls, and to decide what to add to the catalog.

The app also records when a collection is opened, a collection is cast as a slideshow, or an artwork is opened, noting which collection or artwork; and when a search is made, the words searched for and how many works were found.

Nothing is recorded for your own photos, and nothing about what you do outside the art catalog.

The server that hosts the catalog keeps routine logs, including internet addresses, as any web service does.

Stored on your phone

Your TVs (their names, models, and network and hardware addresses, so the app can find them again), your settings, a cache of pictures you have looked at, and the crops you save, which go to Pictures/Showpiece on Android, or the Showpiece album in Photos on iPhone. If you use your phone’s backup, your settings may be included in it. While a slideshow of your photos plays on Android, the app also keeps the list of those photos and its place in it, so the slideshow can carry on if the app is closed; it is cleared when the slideshow ends. Clearing the app’s data or uninstalling it removes everything except the crops you saved and, on iPhone, the free-plan counts described below.

Purchases and the free plan

Showpiece Pro is bought through the App Store or Google Play, which take the payment under their own privacy policies; Showpiece never sees your name or payment details. Purchases are handled by RevenueCat, which receives a random ID the app makes up, your purchase and its receipt from the store, and basic details about your device and the app’s version, so it can confirm what you have bought and restore it. That ID is not linked to your name, email address or any account.

On the free plan, the app counts how many pictures you have exported and how much casting time you have used on this device, so it knows when the free allowance is used up. The counts say nothing about which pictures or who you are. On iPhone they are kept in the phone’s keychain, so they remain if the app is deleted and reinstalled; erasing the phone removes them.

Casting

Casting uses Google Cast, which handles the connection to your TV under Google’s own privacy policy. On iPhone you can also use AirPlay, which is part of iOS and works under Apple’s privacy policy. The Showpiece TV app, on Google TV and Fire TV, connects to your phone directly over your Wi-Fi. The screen your TV shows is a small page that Showpiece provides, which only displays pictures. They reach it directly from your phone or from the museums that publish them, and never pass through Showpiece’s servers.

Google’s Cast software, which is built into the app, sends Google anonymous diagnostic and usage information about casting, to make casting work and to improve it. It is not linked to you.

What is not collected

• Your name, email address or phone number, unless you include your email address with feedback.
• Your location or contacts.
• Advertising identifiers.

There are no accounts, and apart from Google Cast and RevenueCat (for purchases) the app contains no third-party code that collects data: no analytics, crash reporting or advertising code. Nothing is sold, or shared for advertising.

Tracking

Showpiece does not track you across apps and websites or anywhere else.

If you send feedback

Settings has a feedback form. When you send it, the message includes what you write, the kind of feedback you chose, your email address if you give one, and details about your device: the app’s version, your phone or tablet’s model and system version, and the names of the TVs you use with the app (with your Frame’s model). These details help me understand and fix problems. Your feedback is stored in the feedback database I use for all my apps, hosted by Supabase, and emailed to me through Resend. I use it only to reply and to fix things, and I do not share it. To have it deleted, email me.

The Support and feedback page on this website sends to the same place. It includes what you write, the kind of feedback you chose, and your email address and device details if you give them.

You can also email me directly at the address below.

Changes

If the app ever changes in a way that affects this policy, I will update this page and the effective date above.

Contact

Questions are welcome: michael@michaelgladstone.com.