Delete your photos and data
Last updated 16 September 2026
Draft, pending legal review
No lawyer has read this page. The mechanism it describes is real and works today; the wording around retention and what must be kept for accounting is still subject to the legal review.
You can delete the photographs on an order yourself, whenever you like, without asking anyone. This page explains where the button is, what pressing it actually removes, and — just as importantly — what it does not.
How to delete, in order of speed
1. The button on your order page
Open your order and scroll to the bottom. There is a section headed Delete my photos with a single button: Delete my photos now. It is there for as long as the order still has images attached. Press it and the image files are removed.
Your order page is at /order/ followed by your order reference — the one starting
with ord_ that appears at the top of the page and on your receipt. If you are on the
same browser you used to upload, the order is already open to you.
2. If you no longer have the order open
An order is tied to the browser that created it, by a cookie. If you have cleared that cookie, switched device or used a private window, the order page will tell you it is not available from this browser — which is deliberate, because otherwise anyone who learned your order reference could open your photograph.
On the order page there is a section headed Get to this order on another device. Give it the email address you used at checkout and it issues a one-time link that proves you control that inbox. The link works once and expires after an hour.
During the pilot, that link is not actually emailed. We have not selected a transactional email provider yet, and the service says so on screen rather than pretending a message is on its way. Until one is in place, email support@idphoto.now and we will sort it out.
3. Ask us
Email support@idphoto.now with your order reference and tell us to delete the photographs. We will ask you to show the request is yours — normally by tying it to an order you can already open. We will not ask you to send a photograph of yourself or a scan of an identity document to prove who you are, and we will never ask you to email us the photograph you want deleted.
Knowing an order reference is not, by itself, permission to delete that order. If we cannot connect a request to a session or a verified inbox, we will tell you so rather than delete someone else's photograph on a guess.
It also happens automatically
You do not have to remember. Images are removed on a schedule whether or not you ask: 24 hours for an order that was never paid for, 30 days for a paid one. The 30 days exist so you can come back for your file, not because we want to hold it.
What deletion removes
Every stored image object belonging to that order: the original you uploaded, any working copy made while checking it, the preview, and any file we produced for you to download or print.
Each object is deleted individually and the outcome for each one is recorded separately as deleted, already absent or failed. If any single object fails to delete, the job is marked failed and your order is not marked as cleared. We would rather show you a partial failure that can be retried than round it up to a green tick. "We deleted your photos" is a claim, and it should be backed by a per-object result.
What deletion does not remove
The order record survives, with a timestamp recording that its materials are gone. So do the payment events, any refund record, and the audit trail of what happened to the order. None of them contains a photograph.
We keep them because we have to account for what was sold and be able to handle a complaint or a card dispute months later — and because separating the two lifecycles like this is precisely what stops "we need records" from becoming a reason to keep your face.
One thing we will not quietly omit: today the measurements taken from your photograph outlive the image itself. Those include dimensions, file format, exposure and sharpness scores, background readings, and a few EXIF-derived strings such as the camera model and the capture date. Whether they should be purged along with the image is an open question in our legal review. It is listed on the privacy policy too.
Deletion is not reversible
A deleted photograph is never recovered and never regenerated. This is enforced in the code rather than promised in prose: once an order's materials are marked deleted, every path that could hand back a file refuses, for our own staff as well as for you, and no path anywhere reconstructs the image. There is no undo, no grace period and no hidden copy to restore from.
If you press the button and immediately wish you had not, the answer is not a restore — it is a new upload, which costs nothing. See below.
What we will not claim about backups
Live data is deleted immediately. Our hosting and database providers keep their own backups and snapshots on their own schedules. We do not control those, and we do not use them to restore individual customer records. We are not going to tell you that pressing a button erases your photograph from every backup on earth within the second, because it would not be true.
Two things that make that residual window smaller than it sounds: photographs are never public and never cacheable, so there is no content-delivery copy anywhere to purge; and the storage holding them is configured so that a delete is a delete rather than a new version sitting behind the old one.
What we can offer instead
If your photos are gone and you still need one, there are exactly two options.
- Upload a new photo under the same order, at no extra cost. A re-upload on a paid order never charges you a second time. Your order page offers it directly. This is the right answer in almost every case.
- A refund. If you no longer want the service at all, we refund what we charged. See the refund policy.
That is the whole menu. Anyone who offers to recover a deleted photograph is telling you something about how they delete things.
Deleting the rest of your data
Your email address, if you gave one at checkout, sits on a billing contact record, and there may be a verified identity record if you used a one-time link. To have those removed, email support@idphoto.now. What we cannot delete on request is the underlying accounting record of a payment that actually happened — that is the part we are required to keep, and as above it holds no photograph.
The payment itself is handled by Dodo Payments as merchant of record, which keeps its own transaction record as an independent controller. Deleting your data with us does not delete Dodo's record of the transaction, and we would be misleading you if we implied it did.
Related pages
- Privacy policy — what we hold and for how long
- Refund policy
- Contact us