Data Retention & Cryptographic Asset Deletion

Data Lifecycle Principles

BestShots is designed as an agile photo curation accelerator rather than an indefinite cloud storage vault. After photographers cull and export their Lightroom XMP sidecars, maintaining gigabytes of discarded RAW files consumes unnecessary cloud capacity and creates data liability.

BestShots provides automated, configurable data retention controls:

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Configurable Discard Auto-Deletion

In Storage Settings, studios can configure automated cleanup schedules:

• Auto-Delete Discards (storage_auto_delete_rejected_days): Automatically purges photos marked as REJECT after a designated grace period (e.g. 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days).
• Grace Period Recovery: Before the auto-delete threshold arrives, photographers can review discarded stacks and restore photos to KEEP with a single click.

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Cryptographic Cascading Deletion

When a user or automated job deletes a photo or project:

1. Storage Blob Purge: Azure Blob Storage immediately unlinks and cryptographically purges original RAW payloads, WebP thumbnails, and face crop avatars.
2. Database Cascade: Foreign key cascades in Neon PostgreSQL remove rows from photos, photo_analyses, photo_faces, and photo_stacks.
3. Immutable Audit Record: A cryptographic summary is written to deletion_logs recording:
   • Total files removed
   • Aggregated byte size
   • Deletion timestamp and initiating user identifier

This provides studio managers and enterprise compliance officers with full legal verification of data sanitization.