Privacy Policy
Last updated: February 2026
This policy describes both current features and planned features such as zone communities. During the beta, your journal is completely private—no sharing features are available yet.
The short version: Your journal is private. Your photos, notes, and gardening history belong to you. We collect only what we need to run the service. We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not share your information with third parties for marketing. You can delete your account and all your data at any time.
What We Collect
We collect the minimum needed to provide the service:
- Email address — used to sign you in via magic link and to send occasional service updates
- Garden photos and notes — the content you upload to build your journal
- Photo date and GPS coordinates — extracted from your photo metadata (EXIF data) when available. The date is used to lay out your photos on a timeline. The GPS coordinates are used to group photos into different gardens.
- Payment information — processed securely by Stripe; we never see or store your card number
Cookies
We use a single cookie to keep track of whether you are logged in or out. We do not use cookies for tracking, analytics, or advertising.
We do not embed anything from other websites — no social media buttons, no analytics services, no ad networks. This means no third party can place cookies in your browser or track your activity while you use Gardening Journal.
Your Journal Is Private
Everything you upload is private by default. Your timeline, photos, and notes are visible only to you. This is your record—safe and yours.
USDA Hardiness Zone Communities
Gardeners learn best from each other—including from failures, not just successes. To support this, each garden you create is automatically placed in a USDA plant hardiness zone community based on its GPS coordinates. For example, a garden in Amherst, MA joins the Zone 6b community, and a garden on Cape Cod joins Zone 7a.
We scrub GPS coordinates from your photos. The coordinates are extracted and stored to determine your hardiness zone and to group photos by garden for gardeners that have more than one garden. GPS coordinates are never displayed to other users. If you prefer not to upload photos with GPS data at all, you can manually set a hardiness zone on each garden and assign photos to it instead.
What this means for your photos: your garden photos are visible to other members of your zone community by default. There is no per-photo sharing toggle. This is deliberate—the goal of this site is to make you a better gardener and part of that is viewing other people's authentic records of their gardening progress, and you doing the same for them. A photo journal of a potato beetle infestation, the damage they did, and how you dealt with it is just as useful as a gorgeous photo of a sunflower with the sun on it after a warm summer rain shower.
What zone members see: your garden name, photos, dates, and notes. They do not see your GPS coordinates, address, or other identifying metadata. Only the hardiness zone is shown.
The exception: for truly personal photos, you can mark individual entries as private. Private entries are visible only to you and do not appear in the zone community.
How We Use Your Information
We use your information to:
- Provide and maintain your gardening journal
- Send you sign-in links
- Process payments for your subscription
We do not sell your data, serve ads, or share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Data Security
Your photos and data are stored securely on AWS infrastructure. All connections use HTTPS. Payment processing is handled by Stripe, which is PCI-compliant.
Your Rights
You can:
- Access all the photos and notes in your journal at any time
- Delete your account and all associated data
- Leave a zone community to stop sharing with its members
- Mark individual entries as private
Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@gardening-journal.com