How We Process Photos

This page explains, in plain language, exactly what happens to photos you upload to FashionDB.

The face lookalike tool (/identify)

When you upload a photo to the lookalike tool, it is used for one purpose: computing a numerical face representation — an "embedding" — using face-recognition models that run on FashionDB's own servers. No third-party service ever receives your photo.

That embedding is compared against embeddings of publicly available photos of fashion-industry professionals to find visually similar faces. Here is what we do and do not keep:

• The original uploaded photo is not stored on our servers. It is processed in memory/temporary storage and deleted immediately after the comparison completes.
• The computed embedding of your uploaded photo is not retained.
• Uploaded photos are not used to train any models.
• No human reviews uploaded photos.

If you are logged in, a small thumbnail of the uploaded photo and the top match are saved to your account's identification history, and entries from that history can appear in the site's public "Recent Identifications" feed. If you are logged out, your history is kept only in your own browser (localStorage) and never on our servers. You can delete your identification history at any time from the /identify page; deletion removes it from our servers and from the public feed.

Model-application photos (/become-a-model)

Photos you submit with a model application are handled differently from lookalike uploads. They are stored in FashionDB's file storage as part of your application, used solely to evaluate the application and to contact you about modeling opportunities, and visible only to FashionDB administrators — they are not published on the site. Applications (including their photos) are retained until you delete them or ask us to. You can delete your application and its photos from the Data Deletion page.