Face search in client galleries

What your guest does

In a gallery where you have switched it on, the guest taps Find photos of me. They are told what is about to happen — that their selfie is compared with the faces in that gallery's photographs, that this is biometric processing of their face, who does the comparison and where — and they tick a consent box before they can choose or take a selfie.

Then they see their own photographs, and can switch back to all of them at any time, or download just theirs where you allow downloads at all. The photos they found are remembered on that device for two weeks, so they can come back without searching again.

The selfie itself is used only for that one search, in memory, and is never stored. If no face is visible, or nobody matches, the guest is told so and the gallery behaves exactly as it did before.

It is off until you turn it on, gallery by gallery

Face search is off by default, and you turn it on for one gallery, from that gallery's own settings. There is an account-level setting too, under Settings › AI features, but it is a permission rather than an action: with it on, nothing is indexed until you switch a particular gallery on and confirm the consent behind it. Hidden photographs are never indexed.

Turning it on does not take effect the moment you flip the switch. First you are shown what it means — that it covers everyone in the photographs, not only the guests who choose to search; who indexes the faces and in which region; that visitors to the gallery are told, with your email as the route to object; and when the index is destroyed. Then you confirm, in writing, that you hold the consent of the people in those photographs.

That confirmation is recorded with your name, the time, and the version of the text you agreed to, in the gallery's audit log. Declining leaves the feature off, and the server applies the same rule, so closing the dialog writes nothing at all.

What is created, and what is not

• A face template — a numeric representation of a face, not an image — for each face found, up to fifteen per photograph, held in a collection belonging to that one gallery.
• Aurant itself stores only the mapping between a template's identifier and the photograph it came from, so a match can be turned back into photographs a guest can see.
• No face crops, no facial landmarks, and no inferred attributes — not age, not gender, not emotion. None is requested and none is stored.
• The templates are never used to train any model.

The whole schedule, in plain words and in more detail than this page, is published at the face search retention and destruction schedule. It is a public page on purpose: a schedule a client cannot read is not a schedule they can hold you to.

When it is destroyed

A gallery's face index exists only while that gallery has face search switched on and is live. It is destroyed as soon as any one of these is true:

• you turn face search off for the gallery;
• the gallery's link reaches its expiry date, or is deactivated;
• the gallery is deleted;
• you turn face search off for your whole account, or your plan no longer includes it;
• you delete your account's AI data, or your account.

So the longest a gallery's index can exist is until that gallery expires. A gallery with no expiry date keeps its index until you switch the feature off or delete the gallery, and no longer.

If someone in the photographs objects

Every gallery whose faces are indexed carries a notice saying so, naming you and giving your email address as the route to object. Someone who writes to you can have their faces removed: switching face search off for that gallery destroys the index entirely.

That is the part a feature list usually leaves out, and it is the reason this page exists in the open. Face search is biometric processing of people who are not in the room when the switch is flipped.

Which plans include it

• Free: not included.
• Basic, £9 a month: 500 photos indexed per gallery.
• Pro, £49 a month: 1,500 photos per gallery.
• Ultimate, £149 a month: 4,000 photos per gallery.

Monthly and daily limits per plan are on every plan beside these. Photographs beyond your plan's limit for a gallery are simply not indexed, and the gallery tells you how many.

The rest of the gallery, unchanged

Face search sits inside a normal client gallery: your files at full resolution, your own look, favourites, downloads you control, and films alongside the photographs. Guests who would rather not search never have to — the gallery works exactly as it does without the feature.

And the rest of the job is in the same account: contracts with online signing and a booking page on every plan, quotes and invoices paid online, and a portfolio built from work you have already delivered. Everything is in English and French, in the app and on every page your clients open.