How the model photos and documents will be stored in the future
The plan to move to a new storage system for model photos and documents is being implemented already and the first phase will be in version 6.1 of the app that's due to be released quite soon.
The phases are:
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Populating the new storage server. Existing media is scanned automatically and uploaded to the new server in the background. This should only happen when on wifi and be totally invisible. During this phase new files added to a model are saved to iCloud Drive as before, but also uploaded to the new server. Same when deleting a file or a model. The files on iCloud Drive are still the driving ones.
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The server is now the authoritative party. The app now fetches data about what files belong to a model from the server instead of scanning iCloud Drive. Data is loaded from the server and cached on the device. New files are still saved to iCloud Drive as a backup but otherwise iCloud Drive is not really used.
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iCloud Drive is no longer used. The app does all file handling using the new storage server and does not touch iCloud Drive anymore. At this point the requirement for having iCloud Drive enabled for the app is removed and the app will not show an error when loading if it's not enabled in Settings. Existing files are not removed, but the user is made aware of the old files and can delete them if he/she so wishes.
Hetzner has been selected as the storage server and the data center in Helsinki, Finland will be used.
The privacy policy has been updated to mention this new server. Account deletion in the app now also deletes any data on the storage server too.