Data Retention & Permanent Project Deletion
Configure automated discard purge timers, execute permanent project deletions, and maintain audit compliance for corporate and commercial clients.
Clean Studio Storage & Agile Workflows
BestShots is designed as a high-speed culling accelerator rather than an indefinite cloud archive. Once you complete your cull and export your XMP companion sidecars into Adobe Lightroom Classic or Capture One, keeping hundreds of rejected test shots and blurred duplicates in cloud storage consumes unnecessary space and creates data management overhead.
BestShots provides automated, configurable retention controls to keep your studio catalog lean, secure, and compliant with client agreements.
Configurable Discard Auto-Deletion
In your studio Storage Settings, you can configure automated cleanup schedules tailored to your post-production turnaround:
- Automated Discard Purge: Automatically purges photos marked as Discard after a chosen grace period (such as 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days).
- Grace Period Recovery: Before the auto-delete threshold arrives, you can review discarded photos in your gallery and restore any frame to Keeper status with a single press of K.
- Immediate Manual Purge: Click Purge Discards in your project toolbar to immediately delete all rejected frames once your client delivery is exported.
Permanent Cascading Deletion
When you delete an individual photo or an entire project from your studio catalog:
- Immediate Preview & Crop Destruction: All associated high-resolution preview proxies, thumbnails, and facial crops are permanently and securely deleted from the cloud vault.
- Metadata Sanitization: All quality scores, facial groupings, burst cluster links, and camera metadata are permanently erased from your catalog.
- Irrevocable Action: Deletion is final and irreversible, ensuring complete compliance with client data privacy mandates and corporate non-disclosure agreements.
Compliance Verification for Commercial Studios
Commercial, corporate, and healthcare photography contracts often require formal confirmation that client imagery has been securely deleted following project delivery:
- Verifiable Deletion Summaries: BestShots generates a timestamped record confirming the date, time, and total photo count removed during a project deletion.
- Client Audit Reports: Studio managers can use these deletion summaries to provide written verification of data sanitization to corporate compliance officers and enterprise legal teams.
Note
Deleting a project in BestShots removes only the cloud preview proxies and metadata stored in your BestShots vault. Your master camera RAW files stored on your local workstation or external SSDs remain completely untouched.