Progress photos and measurements: how we keep them private

A photo tells you things the scale cannot. In a fat-loss phase your weight might barely move for two weeks while your waist drops a size, and a side-by-side photo shows it. But a shirtless mirror photo is also the most personal thing most people will ever upload to an app, so I want to explain exactly what happens to it.

What happens when you upload a photo

On the Progress tab, under Progress photos, tap Add photo and choose one from your gallery or camera. Before it is stored, the app does the following:

1. Re-encodes the image. The original file is never kept. A fresh image is created from the pixels.
2. Removes EXIF and GPS data. Phone cameras embed location, device model, time and sometimes the owner's name in the file. All of that is dropped during re-encoding.
3. Resizes to a maximum of 1280 px on the long edge. That is plenty to compare two photos and small enough to upload on a slow connection.

The stored photo is visible only to you, on your account, after you sign in. It does not appear in any report, in the Copy summary text, in the PDF export, or to anyone in gym mode. A gym owner or trainer sees your 7-day workouts and protein in the member overview and nothing else.

Comparing two photos

Tap Compare, pick two dates, and they show side by side. For this to be useful, take the photos the same way each time:

• Same spot, same light, ideally morning before eating.
• Same pose: front, relaxed, arms slightly away from the body.
• Same distance from the mirror or the camera.

Every two weeks is often enough. Daily photos just show you how much water you drank yesterday.

Body measurements

Measurements are, in my experience, more honest than weight and less emotional than photos. The Progress tab lets you log eight: weight, waist, chest, arm, thigh, hip, neck and body fat percentage. Each entry gets a date, and the app shows a change summary (for example "waist −3 cm since 1 May") and a chart for waist.

A few notes on taking them:

• Waist: at the navel, tape snug but not pressed in, after breathing out normally. This is the one that tracks fat loss best. Measure it weekly.
• Arm and thigh: relaxed, at the widest point, same arm each time. Useful in a muscle phase.
• Neck and hip: these matter mostly if you want a body-fat estimate from a tape formula.
• Body fat: enter it if you have a reading from a gym machine or calipers, but treat it as a trend, not a fact. Those devices are inconsistent, and Repyra does not calculate body fat for you from photos.

A sample four-week log

Look at the week of 15 June. Weight went up 100 g and a lot of people would call that a bad week. Waist dropped a centimetre and the arm grew half a centimetre. That is recomposition working, and only the tape shows it. The change summary on the Progress tab would read waist −4 cm, arm +1 cm, weight −1.1 kg over the month.

Weigh-ins

The weight log on Progress is also what the weekly report uses for weight start and end. Weigh yourself Monday morning after the bathroom and before breakfast, and turn on the Monday weigh-in reminder under Profile, then Reminders. One weekly reading beats seven daily readings for most people, because the daily swing from salt and water is bigger than the weekly change from fat.

Deleting and exporting

Each photo and measurement has a delete option. Deleting a photo removes the stored file, not just the entry. If you want a copy of everything, Profile has Data export, which includes your measurements and weight history. Photos are yours to download individually from the Progress tab.

Why I went this far

Because a beginner who is self-conscious about their body is exactly the person who benefits most from photo comparison, and exactly the person who will never use it if there is any doubt about who can see it. Removing location data and keeping the photos out of every shared surface was the minimum I would accept for my own photos, so it is what the app does for yours.