Your files stay on your Mac.

The short version

• The app doesn’t contact a server. Indexing, text recognition, duplicate detection, Visual Search and thumbnails all happen on your Mac.
• Your license is verified on the Mac. There is no sign-in, no account and no online activation step.
• Your files stay where they are. Nothing in your folders is uploaded to us or anyone else.

Last updated: 4 November 2026.

The app

Vista reads the folders you choose and builds its own index and thumbnails on your Mac so it can show your files quickly. That data lives on your Mac as app data; it is not a copy that gets sent anywhere.

Text recognition in screenshots and PDFs, duplicate and near-identical photo detection, Visual Search, and folder colors and styles are all processed on the device. That is why Vista works with Wi‑Fi switched off.

The Visual Search model is the one thing Vista downloads. It is fetched once when you set the feature up, stored as app data on your Mac, and used locally from then on. Your photos and videos are never sent to us or to anyone else. Only the model comes down, and nothing goes up.

Your license

When you buy Vista, your license key is emailed to you by Polar, our payment provider. The key is checked on your Mac. There is no license server call, no account to create and no online activation step, so Vista keeps working when you are offline.

Buying Vista

Checkout is handled by Polar, the merchant of record for Vista. Your payment details are entered in Polar’s checkout and go to Polar; we never see your card number. We receive the details needed to support your order, such as your email address and order status. Polar’s own privacy policy applies to the payment itself.

This website

The marketing site is made of static pages. It does not use analytics, advertising pixels or tracking cookies.

A few parts of the page are loaded from other services, which means those services see the request your browser makes:

• Google Fonts serves the Inter typeface used on the page.
• Tailwind’s CDN serves the CSS utility script used by the home page.
• Polar serves the embedded checkout and processes payment when you open it. Polar may set cookies that are needed to complete a purchase.

These are ordinary web requests. We do not receive or store the information they carry.

What we don’t do

• We don’t create user profiles or require an account to use the app.
• We don’t include analytics, telemetry or crash reporting that phones home in the app.
• We don’t sell or share your information with data brokers or advertisers.
• We don’t track you across other websites.

Deleting local data

Vista’s index, thumbnails and the Visual Search model are stored as app data on your Mac. Removing the app and its app data removes them. Your own files are never touched by that. They stay exactly where you keep them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date above. If a change matters, we’ll say so clearly here rather than bury it in a changelog.

Questions

Reply to your purchase receipt or to the email that came with your license key and we’ll help.