Lumen › Privacy
Privacy Policy
Lumen is a camera, RAW developer and photo editor for iPhone, made by Bakari Mustafa. This policy explains what the app does with your information. In short: Lumen collects no data and sends nothing off your iPhone.
Effective date: 10 November 2026
No data collected
Lumen makes no network requests. It has no accounts or sign-in, and contains no analytics, advertising, crash-reporting or tracking code, and no third-party code of any kind. It does not use the advertising identifier and does not track you across other apps or websites. The developer receives nothing from the app: not your photos, not how you use it, not your device details.
The privacy manifest built into the app declares that no data is collected.
Your photos stay on your iPhone
Taking, developing and editing photos and videos all happens on your iPhone. That includes on-device features such as subject, person and sky masks, which use Apple’s on-device frameworks. Your photos are never uploaded and never used to train anything.
- Photos and videos you take are saved to Apple Photos.
- Edits are saved in Apple Photos as non-destructive edits, with the settings stored alongside the photo. The original is never changed, and you can revert an edit in Photos at any time.
- Your own Looks, Recipes and imported LUTs, and the app’s settings, are stored in Lumen’s own storage on your iPhone.
If you use iCloud Photos, Apple stores and syncs your library, including Lumen’s edits, under Apple’s own privacy policy. When you open a photo whose original is in iCloud, iOS may download it from your library; that is your own library, handled by Apple. Like other app data, Lumen’s own storage may be included in your iPhone’s backups.
Deleting your data. Delete photos in Lumen or in Photos (deletions always go through iOS’s confirmation and Recently Deleted). Delete your own Looks and Recipes in the app, or delete the app to remove everything in its own storage. Edits already saved in Photos stay with those photos until you revert them in Photos.
Permissions
Lumen asks for each permission when you first use the feature that needs it. You can change any of them later in Settings › Apps › Lumen.
| Permission | What Lumen uses it for |
|---|---|
| Camera | Taking photos and videos, in the app and in the Lock Screen camera. |
| Microphone | Recording sound with the videos you shoot. Lumen does not listen at any other time. |
| Photos (read) | Showing your library, so you can browse, cull and edit your photos. |
| Photos (add) | Saving the photos and videos you take and the images you export. |
| Location | Only if you turn on Save location in the camera’s settings. It is off by default. |
Location. When Save location is on, Lumen writes where a photo was taken into that photo’s own metadata, as the built-in Camera app does. The location is not stored anywhere else and never leaves your iPhone except inside a photo you choose to share. When you export, you can remove the location, and the social-media export presets remove it for you.
The Lock Screen camera
If you add the Lumen Camera control to Control Centre, the Lock Screen or the Action button, you can take photos while your iPhone is locked. Those photos are kept in a temporary folder that iOS provides for Lumen on your iPhone. The next time you open Lumen, they are moved into Apple Photos and removed from that folder. The Lock Screen camera cannot see your library.
Recording to an external drive
If you choose a connected drive under Record to, iOS first asks whether Lumen may use it. Videos recorded to the drive are written to the drive’s DCIM folder and stay there; they are not added to Photos. Lumen reads only the drive’s free space and the files it writes. If the drive is disconnected during a take, recording continues on your iPhone and that part is saved to Photos.
Sharing and exporting
When you share or export a photo, it goes only where you send it, using iOS’s share sheet or Files. Whatever you share with another app or service is then handled under that service’s privacy policy. Export lets you choose how much metadata to keep.
Children
Lumen does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If the way Lumen handles information ever changes, this page will be updated and the effective date changed. Any future feature that sends information off your iPhone would be optional, clearly separate in the app, and described here before it ships.
Contact
Questions about this policy or about Lumen: bakari@bakarimustafa.com.