Four questions people ask before they upload anything

The same four questions come up before anyone tries this, in roughly the same order. They deserve short answers rather than long ones.

Is it safe?

Depends entirely on retention, and retention is a number in a document. The direct treatment of the question covers the specifics, and the practical version is: look for a stated retention period for your source photographs, and look for an explicit statement about whether they are used for training.

Not "are they shared" — that is a different question with a more comforting answer. Whether they feed the model that serves other people. Silence there is itself information.

The other half of safety is who else touches the images. Every vendor of this size uses third-party infrastructure; that is normal, not alarming. What matters is that the list exists and is specific about countries.

Is it cheap?

Cheaper than a session, and the gap is larger than the invoices suggest because a session costs you two or three hours that never appear on a quote. The budget end of the category has real options, and the thing to check is not price per image but how many images you get to choose from — a good result from forty is a different product from a good result from four.

Is it any good?

For most faces, yes, and the honest qualifier matters more than the yes. These systems fail unevenly: strong glasses, tightly curled hair, darker skin tones, marked asymmetry. Product pages show the successes because that is what product pages are.

The only useful test is your own face on a free tier. Ten minutes settles it.

Where is this going?

The longer view is speculative and we wrote it, so treat it accordingly. The one prediction that seems safe is unglamorous: the interesting competition is moving from image quality, which has largely plateaued, to consistency across a group of people over time — a much duller problem and a much harder one.

The variant that is not about work at all

Yearbook-style images are the obvious counterexample to the whole professional framing. Same technique, entirely different purpose, and the quality bar changes: for a work portrait, likeness is everything; for a stylised one, it is barely relevant.

Two practical notes

If you write about this category and want to earn from referrals, the affiliate programme has the terms in public.

And if you are curious what the thing is actually built on rather than what it claims, the infrastructure page is unusually specific for a vendor. Most companies in this category will not tell you.