Trust and security

PhotoFroggy reads some of the most personal things you own: your photos, messages and contacts. You shouldn't have to take a stranger's word that it's safe, so this page lists exactly what it does, and how to check every claim yourself.

The short version: your photos, videos, messages, contacts, music and files only ever travel between your iPhone and your own PC, over the USB cable. PhotoFroggy talks to the internet for three things only: activating your licence, checking for updates, and downloading an update when you click Update now. There is no account, no cloud, no analytics and no tracking.

Everything PhotoFroggy connects to

Address	When	What is sent
`api.photofroggy.com`	When you activate or deactivate a licence, and a quick re-check about every 14 days	Your licence key and an anonymous PC ID (a one-way hash, so it can't be traced back to your PC or matched with anything else)
`photofroggy.com/version.json`	When the app opens, at most every few hours	Nothing about you: it just reads a small public file listing the latest version
`download.photofroggy.com`	Only after you click Update now	Nothing: it downloads the new installer

That is the complete list. PhotoFroggy never sends photos, videos, messages, contacts, file names, thumbnails, usage statistics or crash reports anywhere. It has no analytics or advertising code at all. Without internet it still works fully; only activating a licence and updating need a connection.

Check it yourself

Don't take our word for it. Any of these shows every connection PhotoFroggy makes:

Resource Monitor (built into Windows): press Win+R, type resmon, open the Network tab and tick PhotoFroggy.exe.
TCPView from Microsoft Sysinternals, which lists every connection live.
Windows Firewall or GlassWire: block PhotoFroggy completely and watch it carry on working with your iPhone.

You will see local connections to 127.0.0.1: that is PhotoFroggy talking to Apple's iPhone driver and to its own window on your PC, never to the internet.

Verify the installer

Every release's SHA-256 fingerprint is published, so you can confirm the file you downloaded is exactly the one we released and wasn't changed along the way.

Current version: 1.3.0
File: PhotoFroggy-Setup-1.3.0.exe (23.3 MB)
SHA-256: 9df4aa75ee5b6c7e73e173944a8cd08b93eeea2fd4fd09d81f1e6710f57ed241

To check it, open PowerShell in your Downloads folder and run Get-FileHash PhotoFroggy-Setup-1.3.0.exe. The Hash it prints must match the one above. You can also upload the installer, or search for its fingerprint, at VirusTotal, which scans it with about 70 antivirus engines.

Updates are checked the same way. When PhotoFroggy updates itself, it only downloads from download.photofroggy.com over HTTPS and refuses to install anything whose size and SHA-256 don't match what's published.

Why Windows says “Windows protected your PC”

From version 1.2.2, the installer and the app are digitally signed through Microsoft's Artifact Signing service, so Windows shows the verified publisher, William Hollis, the independent developer behind PhotoFroggy. To check it, right-click the installer, choose Properties, then Digital Signatures.

Windows SmartScreen can still show this warning for a while, because it also waits until it has seen enough people download a new app. It is a reputation check, not a sign that anything harmful was found. Click More info: the publisher should read William Hollis. Then click Run anyway.

On your PC

Nothing listens to your network. PhotoFroggy's window is served only to your own PC (127.0.0.1), and every request needs a secret that is new each time the app starts, so other programs and web pages can't use it.
Your data stays in one folder you control: %LOCALAPPDATA%\PhotoFroggy holds a copy of the photo library index, thumbnails, your licence, and, if you read them, your messages and contacts. Uninstall PhotoFroggy and delete that folder, and nothing is left behind.
Exports go only where you choose, and every file is checked on disk after it is written.

On your iPhone

PhotoFroggy connects through Apple's own iPhone driver (Apple Mobile Device Support) and the standard Trust This Computer pairing. No jailbreak, no profile and nothing installed on the phone.
It only reads. The one thing it ever changes is deleting photos or videos you've selected and confirmed, and only after verifying a copy on your PC.
Reading messages, contacts and files uses the same mechanism as an iTunes backup, filtered as it streams. Nothing is written to the iPhone, and no full backup is left on your PC.

What we know about you

Only what's needed to give you a licence: your email address, your licence key, the order ID, and the anonymous IDs of the PCs it's activated on. Payments are handled by Paddle, our reseller and merchant of record, so we never see your card details. We never sell or share your information. Details are in the privacy policy.

Open-source components

PhotoFroggy is built with well-known open-source libraries (Python, FastAPI, pywebview and others). Their licences are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt, installed alongside the app. The parts that talk to your iPhone (Apple's device protocols) were written for PhotoFroggy rather than taken from a third-party iPhone toolkit; the encryption they use comes from the standard, widely audited cryptography library.

Report a security issue

Found something? Please email support@photofroggy.com with “Security” in the subject. We read every report and reply quickly. Our contact details are also published in security.txt.