The chat is the part people worry about. The images are the part that is more exposed, more persistent, and least covered by the policies people actually read.
Where the file goes
When an app generates a picture, it is written to object storage and served through a content delivery network — the same infrastructure any site uses for images. Your gallery is a list of those files.
The important consequence is about how the file is protected. There are two approaches and the difference matters:
Signed or authenticated URLs. The link expires, or the server checks your session before serving the file. Copy the URL, open it elsewhere, and you get nothing.
Long unguessable URLs. The file sits at an address nobody could reasonably guess, and anyone holding the address can open it, logged in or not, forever.
The second is extremely common because it is cheap and fast. It is not unreasonable — the address genuinely is unguessable — but it means the image is protected by secrecy of the link rather than by access control. A link shared, pasted into a chat, or captured by a browser extension is a public link.
How to check in ten seconds: open a generated image in a new tab, copy the address, and paste it into a private window. If it loads, the file is protected by obscurity alone. Worth knowing before you generate anything you would mind being detached from your account.
Why deletion often misses them
Conversations and images are usually stored in different systems. A deletion request implemented against the conversation database does not necessarily reach object storage, and the CDN may hold cached copies for a while after the origin file is gone.
None of this is necessarily bad faith. It is what happens when deletion is built against the primary database and images live somewhere else.
The practical move, when you close an account, is to ask explicitly: does this include generated images, and how long until they are removed from storage and cache? The full sequence is in deleting an AI companion account.
Moderation keeps copies
Images are scanned, automatically and sometimes by people. Anything flagged is typically retained longer than ordinary content — often specifically excluded from deletion, because retaining it is how the operator demonstrates compliance.
This is normal, it is disclosed in most policies, and it means a picture that tripped a filter is the one most likely to outlive your account.
The two hard rules
Never upload a photo of a real person. Not a partner, not a celebrity, not someone from a dating app. Every credible operator prohibits it; an increasing number of jurisdictions criminalise generating intimate imagery of an identifiable person without consent; and it is the single fastest route to a permanent ban with no appeal.
This is also where the technical and the ethical point in the same direction: the person in the photo has not agreed to be in your chat log, and the chat log is stored.
Assume the prompt is stored with the image. The text you wrote to produce a picture is usually retained alongside it, and it is far more revealing than the picture. People are careful about images and careless about prompts.
If you want to keep them
Download what you want and treat the gallery as temporary. Apps reorganise storage, change plans, expire media for inactive accounts, and occasionally lose things.
Then store them somewhere you control, and think about where that is — a photo library that syncs to a family account, or auto-uploads to a shared cloud drive, has simply moved the exposure rather than removed it.
What this means when choosing
Two things worth checking in a free tier, alongside the consistency and latency tests:
- Whether image URLs are authenticated, using the private-window test above.
- Whether the app offers a bulk download or an export that includes media.
Apps that put real work into the media side — Candy AI with images and voice inside one subscription, Secret Desires with image and short video generation — are the ones you will accumulate the most files with. That makes the ten-second URL check more worth doing there, not less.
