75 Hard progress photos without handing them to a server

The daily progress photo is one of the five requirements and it is the one people think about least before starting. By day 75 you have a set of seventy five photographs of yourself, mostly in underwear, usually in a bathroom. Where those live for the next decade is a decision worth making once, deliberately, rather than by default.

Several 75 Hard apps upload them. Some do it to enable a comparison view or a timelapse, some do it because their whole architecture assumes a server, and a few are not clear about it either way. Even with good intentions, an uploaded photo is a photo in someone else’s backup, subject to someone else’s breach, retention policy and acquisition.

The alternative is straightforward. Keep them in a dedicated album on the device, locked behind Face ID, excluded from any shared library, and out of any app that asks for full photo library access. The comparison view you lose is easy to rebuild manually at day 25, 50 and 75, which is the only time most people look anyway.

This guide covers how to set that up on iOS, how to check what an app actually uploads, how to strip location metadata, and what to do with the set once the challenge is finished.

Outline

Status: outline. The introduction above is finished copy. Everything below is the section plan for the full draft, targeted at about 1 200 words.

1. What the requirement is for. Comparison, not documentation, and why that changes the storage question.
2. What the apps do with them. Upload, on-device, and unclear, with how to tell which.
3. A locked album on iOS. Hidden album, Face ID, and excluding it from shared libraries.
4. Photo library permissions. Limited access, and why an app should never need the whole library.
5. Location metadata. Stripping it, and checking that it is gone.
6. After day 75. Keeping, archiving or deleting, decided in advance.