Teserra is a desktop app. Your library lives on your Mac, and this page lists the few things that ever leave it.
Your images, files, titles, tags, collections and search index are stored in the vault folder you chose, on your disk. Teserra never uploads them. Visual search and Find Similar run on a model downloaded to your Mac.
There is no account. We do not know who you are unless you buy a license or write to us.
Payment is handled by Stripe. We receive your email address and the payment confirmation, never your card details. Your license key is emailed to you through Resend. We keep your email and license record to let you re-download, activate on up to three Macs, and get help.
When Teserra starts, it contacts our license server with your license key or trial status, a random identifier for this installation, the app version and the macOS version. This confirms the license and shows you available updates. If the server is unreachable, the app keeps working.
If “Help improve Teserra” is on, the daily license check also carries counts: how many items the library holds, which add-ons are enabled, how many imports, captures or searches happened since the last check. Never a filename, an image, a title or a tag. A single switch in Settings turns this off, and then nothing is counted or sent.
The Curator writes titles, descriptions and tags using an AI provider you choose, with your own API key. When it runs, the images it catalogs are sent to that provider under your account and their terms. We are not in that exchange and never see those images. Turn the Curator off and nothing is sent anywhere.
When you send feedback from the app, we receive your message, the app and macOS versions, and, if you attach them, a screenshot and a diagnostics summary. Licensed users also send their email so we can reply when the fix ships. Tickets are stored on our server and mirrored in our issue tracker, Linear. Messages sent through the contact form on this site follow the same path.
The extension talks only to the Teserra app running on your Mac. It sends nothing to us.
No cookies, no analytics, no trackers. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs for a short period.
You can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, or ask us to stop emailing you. Write to hello@teserra.app. Deleting your license record ends your ability to reactivate that license.