Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 30, 2026

In short: My Herbarium keeps your herbarium on your device. No account, no advertising, no tracker, and nothing is sold. Only identifying a plant and displaying a map call on third-party services, at your own initiative.

1. Data collected

My Herbarium does not collect any personal data. All information you enter (plants, photos, notes, locations) is stored only on your device, in a local database. Some features call on third-party services, described in section 5.

2. Camera and photos

The application requests access to your camera and photo gallery to:

Photograph the plants you wish to catalogue
Select existing photos for your plant records

Photos are stored locally on your device. They are never sent to a server, unless you voluntarily use the identification feature (see section 5).

3. Geolocation

The app can use your GPS position to record where a plant was observed. This data is:

Optional: you may type the place by hand, or leave it empty
Kept on your device only

Two exchanges with third parties are nonetheless inherent to how maps work:

When you ask for your current position, the coordinates are sent to Nominatim (OpenStreetMap Foundation) to obtain the name of the matching place.
Displaying a map downloads its tiles from OpenStreetMap, which reveals to that service the area you are browsing.

Finally, when you share a record, the shared text contains a Google Maps link carrying the observation's coordinates. The app does not contact Google: that link is only followed if its recipient taps it.

4. Data backup

My Herbarium offers an export/import feature in ZIP format. The backup file is created locally and you have full control over it (share by email, personal cloud storage, etc.).

5. Third-party services

The app may communicate with the following services, only at your own initiative:

Pl@ntNet: when you use the "Identify" feature, your photo is sent to the Pl@ntNet API through a relay hosted on Cloudflare, whose only role is to carry the API key on the app's behalf. The photo is re-encoded before being sent: its EXIF metadata, and therefore the GPS coordinates of the shot, are stripped. The relay keeps no photo; it records your IP address for at most ten minutes, solely to rate-limit requests, and Cloudflare keeps a technical request log for three days. See the Pl@ntNet privacy policy.
OpenStreetMap / Nominatim: looking up the name of a place from its coordinates, and map backgrounds. See the OpenStreetMap Foundation privacy policy.
GBIF (gbif.org): biodiversity data lookup (common names, conservation status). Off by default. No personal data is transmitted.
POWO / Kew Gardens (powo.science.kew.org): taxonomic data lookup. Off by default. No personal data is transmitted.
Wikipedia: descriptive article lookup. No personal data is transmitted.

6. Analytics and advertising

My Herbarium does not include any analytics tools (no Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, etc.) and displays no advertisements.

7. Children's data

Since the application does not collect any personal data, it does not specifically process children's data.

8. Changes

This privacy policy may be updated. The last modification date is shown at the top of this page.

9. Contact

For any questions regarding this privacy policy, you can contact us via the project repository on GitLab.