What Happens to the Face Index Built From Your Event Photos
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
Your event photos can stay in your archive indefinitely. The face index built from them cannot: it is deleted within a year of upload, whether or not you keep the photos themselves.
What Happens to the Face Index Built From Your Event Photos
In short: Uploading a photo to TIME&SPACE does two separate things. It stores the photo, which stays in your archive for as long as you keep it. And it builds a face index from the photo, a set of numeric templates used to match guest selfies against it, which does not stay nearly as long. The index is deleted within a year of the photo being uploaded, on its own clock, regardless of what you do with the photo itself.
Organisers tend to think of "the photos" as one thing. There are actually two, and they do not age the same way.
The photo and the face index are not the same data
When a photo is processed, the detector finds every face in it and builds a template for each one: a numeric description of that face's geometry, with no name attached, stored separately from the image. That template is what a guest's selfie gets compared against when they scan to find their photos. The photo file is a separate record, kept in your event's storage however long you choose to keep it.
Deleting one does not require deleting the other, but they are linked in one direction: delete the photo, or delete the event, and its face templates go with it immediately. The reverse is not true, and that is the part worth knowing.
The face index has its own expiry, even if you keep the photo
A face template built from an event photo is deleted automatically within one year of that photo being uploaded, whether or not the photo is still sitting in your gallery or your archive. This is not tied to the event date, to your plan, or to whether guests have claimed their photos yet. It is tied to the upload timestamp, and it runs regardless of anything an organiser does.
The reason is simple. A face template is biometric data under GDPR, and biometric data needs a defined lifetime, not an indefinite one just because the photo it came from is still useful to someone. Keeping the photo as a record is one thing. Keeping an indexed, searchable face from it forever is a different kind of commitment, and it is not one this platform makes by default.
Why the clock starts at upload, not at the event
This matters most for photos that sit around before anyone searches them. If you run a past gallery and upload an old photo set months after the event itself, the one-year clock for its face index starts the day you upload it, not the day the event happened. Upload it and wait too long to tell guests, and the index can run out before most of them have ever scanned.
It matters for live events too, if the upload happens well after the event and there is a long gap before the gallery is promoted. The fix is the same in both cases: upload early, and get guests scanning while the index is live, rather than treating the upload as a task you can finish later at your own pace.
What this looks like from a guest's side
If a guest scans within that window, nothing about this is visible to them. Their selfie is compared against the templates that still exist, a match is found, and their gallery is delivered the normal way. What happens to their own selfie afterward is a separate, much shorter clock, thirty days, and is covered on its own.
The case that is visible is a guest who scans late, after the face index for that photo has already expired. The photo may still be sitting in your archive, viewable to anyone with the link, but there is nothing left to match their selfie against. The search returns no match, not because the photo is gone, but because the index that would have found it is.
What an organiser should actually do with this
Nothing changes about how you use the platform day to day. The one practical habit worth having: do not let a long gap sit between uploading a photo set and telling the people in it that they can go and find themselves. How long photos stay online is a separate decision you make about the gallery itself; the face index is not part of that decision; it runs on its own year-long clock from the moment each photo is uploaded, and nothing resets it except uploading the photo again.
The short version
An uploaded photo and the face index built from it are two different records with two different lifetimes. The photo stays as long as you keep it. The index that lets a selfie find it does not, and is gone within a year of upload regardless. Upload early, promote the gallery while the index is live, and the distinction never has to matter to a single guest.
Founder, TIME&SPACE