Terms of Service
Engineered exclusively for working photographers. You retain 100% copyright over your visual work, we irrevocably guarantee zero AI model training on your photos, and cloud processing operates strictly under Zero Data Retention (ZDR).
100% Copyright Retention
You retain full and complete ownership of all uploaded photos, RAW files, crops, and metadata. BestShots claims zero ownership or IP interest.
Zero AI Model Training
Irrevocable commitment: your photos, faces, and embeddings are NEVER used to train, tune, or evaluate any proprietary or public AI models.
Tenant Data Isolation
Customer files are isolated per-user and per-project in Azure Blob Storage, encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, with short-lived SAS tokens.
Fair Pay-As-You-Go
1 photo = 1 credit. Instant automatic refund on failed analyses. 14-day money-back guarantee on unconsumed credit packs with zero recurring lock-in.
BestShots.AI Transparency Matrix: What We Do vs. What We NEVER Do
Clear contractual boundaries governing your intellectual property and client confidentiality.
What BestShots.AI Performs
- •Processes uploaded RAW and JPEG files to extract camera EXIF and technical capture parameters.
- •Generates downsampled 300x300 Sharp WebP proxy thumbnails for low-latency gallery navigation.
- •Extracts 512-dimensional vector face embeddings ephemerally to cluster burst series and repeating subjects.
- •Produces non-destructive industry-standard XMP sidecar files and ZIP archives for Lightroom Classic.
- •Automatically refunds credits if an analysis job fails or times out.
What BestShots.AI NEVER Performs
- •NEVER trains, fine-tunes, or evaluates any AI or ML model on your customer photos.
- •NEVER sells, licenses, monetizes, or publicly displays your photos, thumbnails, or facial crops.
- •NEVER cross-references face embeddings across different photographer accounts.
- •NEVER shares visual media or biometric embeddings with law enforcement or facial recognition databases.
- •NEVER locks you into recurring monthly subscription fees or prevents project exports.
1. Acceptance of Terms & Eligibility
These Terms of Service ("Terms") constitute a legally binding agreement entered into by and between you, whether personally or on behalf of an entity ("Photographer", "You", or "User"), and BestShots.AI ("BestShots", "Company", "We", "Us", or "Our"), concerning your access to and use of the BestShots.AI website (https://bestshots.ai), the web application (https://app.bestshots.ai), associated APIs, background processing workers, and related services (collectively, the "Service").
By accessing or using the Service, clicking "Create account", or uploading any visual media to our platform, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms, along with our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with all of these Terms, you are expressly prohibited from using the Service and must discontinue use immediately.
The Service is intended solely for working professional photographers, photography studios, photo editors, and authorized visual artists who are at least eighteen (18) years of age and possess the legal capacity to form a binding contract under applicable law.
2. 100% Photographer Copyright Retention
"You (the Photographer) retain 100% of all right, title, interest, and ownership (including all copyright, moral rights, trademark, and other intellectual property rights) in and to all photographs, RAW files, compressed image files, metadata, sidecar files, and visual materials uploaded to or processed by BestShots.AI ('Customer Photos'). Nothing in these Terms grants BestShots.AI any ownership interest in Customer Photos."
BestShots.AI was created with the fundamental premise that photographers’ creative output represents their livelihood. We reject the predatory data-collection practices common among general-purpose AI platforms. Your photographs remain your exclusive intellectual property at all stages of ingestion, proxy generation, neural analysis, burst clustering, and export.
3. Irrevocable Zero AI Model Training Guarantee
"BestShots.AI categorically and irrevocably guarantees that Customer Photos, facial crops, and extracted visual embeddings are NEVER used, shared, sold, or retained to train, fine-tune, distill, align, or improve any artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or neural network models, whether proprietary to BestShots.AI or hosted by third-party infrastructure providers. All inference operations performed via cloud AI services (including Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and local ONNX runtimes) are executed ephemerally under strict zero-data-retention (ZDR) enterprise terms. Your images are never retained by underlying model providers after the analysis response is delivered."
Under no circumstance will your photographs be pooled into foundational datasets, training corpuses, synthetic data generators, or public vision models. BestShots enforces binding enterprise Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements with its cloud providers, prohibiting logging or caching of Customer Photos on inference host nodes.
4. Scope of Limited Operational License
"You grant BestShots.AI a strictly limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, revocable, royalty-free license solely to the extent necessary to perform the automated technical operations requested by you. This license is limited to: (a) temporary caching and transmission across secure infrastructure; (b) generating downsampled thumbnail proxies and display representations; (c) extracting camera EXIF metadata; (d) performing automated facial landmark detection and perceptual hashing; (e) generating non-destructive XMP sidecars; and (f) packaging selected files into compressed archive downloads. BestShots.AI will never publicly display, sublicense, distribute, commercialize, or sell your Customer Photos."
This operational license is strictly functional and terminates completely when you delete the relevant photo, project, or account, subject only to our automated 30-day purge cycle for disaster recovery backups.
5. Ownership of AI Outputs & XMP Metadata
"All AI-generated culling scores, quality ratings, sharpness assessments, face cluster identifiers, burst groupings, and generated XMP sidecar files are your exclusive property and are assigned to you upon creation."
BestShots.AI hereby assigns to you all right, title, and interest in all metadata, ratings, pick/reject status flags, perceptual similarity scores, and generated sidecar files (such as Adobe Lightroom-compatible .xmp files) produced during your curation sessions. You are free to export, modify, or commercialize these outputs in any workflow without restriction or attribution.
6. Tenant Data Isolation, Storage Architecture & Cryptographic Security
We implement multi-tenant cryptographic isolation to ensure your clients' private photos remain strictly inaccessible to unauthorized third parties or other platform users:
Customer Photos are partitioned into dedicated storage paths in Microsoft Azure Blob Storage organized by unique user and project identifiers:users/{userId}/projects/{projectId}/...
Original files and proxy thumbnails are never exposed via public static URLs. Access is granted strictly via time-limited, cryptographically signed Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens with short expiration windows.
All uploaded media files, thumbnail proxies, database records, and vector indices are encrypted at rest using FIPS 140-2 compliant AES-256 encryption.
All data moving between your workstation, our web servers, serverless functions, and database clusters is mandatorily encrypted in transit using modern TLS 1.3.
7. Pay-As-You-Go Credit System & Refund Policy
In accordance with Architecture Decision Record ADR 0001, BestShots.AI operates on a transparent, pay-as-you-go credit pack model rather than a recurring monthly subscription:
CreditTransactionType.REFUND) back to your balance.8. Photographer Responsibilities & Acceptable Use
As a condition of using the Service, you represent, warrant, and agree that:
- You possess all necessary rights, legal consents, model releases, and permissions from any individuals depicted in Customer Photos to upload and process their imagery.
- You will not upload any imagery containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), non-consensual sexual imagery, hate speech, or content that violates applicable criminal statutes.
- You will not attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, or extract the source code or model weights of our local detectors, face embeddings, or proprietary ranking algorithms.
- You will not deploy automated scrapers, bots, or excessive concurrency that overwhelms platform bandwidth or degrades service for other photographers.
9. Third-Party Integrations & Workflows
The Service provides optional integrations with third-party platforms to streamline your post-production workflow:
Adobe Lightroom Classic & Capture One XMP Sync
BestShots produces non-destructive Adobe-compliant XMP sidecar files. BestShots never modifies, rewrites, or overwrites your original camera RAW files. You remain solely responsible for maintaining local backups of your original RAW files on external hard drives or cloud storage.
Google Photos Picker API
When importing media via Google Photos, our application requests the sensitive scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photospicker.mediaitems.readonly. We access strictly those media items you explicitly select in the picker. We strictly adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use provisions.
10. Service Availability & Performance
BestShots.AI utilizes enterprise cloud infrastructure provided by Microsoft Azure and Vercel. While we target 99.9% service uptime, we do not guarantee uninterrupted, error-free operation. Scheduled maintenance, emergency security patches, upstream cloud provider outages, or network interruptions may cause temporary service disruptions.
BestShots is a photo culling and ranking accelerator, not a permanent archival storage vault. Photographers must retain their own primary and secondary backups of all original image files.
11. Termination & 30-Day Hard Erasure Protocol
You may terminate your account at any time directly through Account Settings or by sending an erasure request to privacy@bestshots.ai.
Upon deletion of a project or account, all underlying photo records, proxy thumbnails, face vector embeddings, and associated analysis logs are immediately marked for hard deletion and permanently purged across all primary storage clusters and Azure background queues within thirty (30) calendar days.
12. Disclaimers & Warranties
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW:
THE SERVICE, INCLUDING ALL AI SCORING ALGORITHMS, BURST CLUSTERING, FACE EMBEDDINGS, AND GENERATED METADATA, IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT.
BESTSHOTS.AI DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE AI CULLING SUGGESTIONS WILL BE 100% ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR UNBIASED, NOR DOES IT WARRANT THAT AI RATINGS WILL MEET YOUR SUBJECTIVE EDITORIAL PREFERENCES OR ARTISTIC VISION. YOU REMAIN THE FINAL EDITOR AND DECISION-MAKER FOR ALL PHOTOGRAPHIC SELECTIONS.
13. Limitation of Liability
LIABILITY CAP AND EXCLUSION OF CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES:
IN NO EVENT SHALL BESTSHOTS.AI, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AFFILIATES, OR LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, LOSS OF DATA, OR REPUTATIONAL HARM, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE.
IN ALL CASES, THE TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF BESTSHOTS.AI FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF: (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY YOU TO BESTSHOTS.AI FOR CREDITS IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO LIABILITY; OR (B) ONE HUNDRED UNITED STATES DOLLARS ($100.00 USD).
14. Governing Law & Dispute Resolution
These Terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or related to them shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to conflict of law principles.
Any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or relating to these Terms shall be resolved through confidential, binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Commercial Arbitration Rules. You and BestShots agree that any proceedings to resolve disputes will be conducted solely on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, consolidated, or representative action.
15. Amendments & Contact Information
We reserve the right to amend these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide at least thirty (30) days advance notice by posting an announcement in the web application dashboard, sending an email to your registered address, and updating the "Last Revised" date at the top of this page. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of any amendments constitutes your binding acceptance of the revised Terms.
Questions Regarding These Terms?
Our legal and support engineering team is directly accessible to answer any licensing or data protection inquiries.
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