Would I let this app hold my child's photo? The question I couldn't answer, so I built one where I could.

My first personalised story wasn't made by a company at all. It was made by me, one evening, with a photo of my son and a prompt in ChatGPT: make him a story about space.

And here's the thing nobody tells you: he had absolutely no interest in the story. None. The entire fascination, the wide eyes, the grab-the-screen excitement, was built on one thing. He recognised himself. He was in it.

That lasted exactly two pages.

By page three, the character had drifted so far from the boy on page one that the spell broke. The face wasn't quite his face any more. The magic didn't fade; it snapped. And watching it snap taught me something I've never forgotten: recognition is the whole product. A child doesn't fall in love with a story about someone who looks a bit like them. They fall in love with a mirror.

So I went looking for someone who did this properly.

The search that made me angry

I assumed the hard part would be the technology. It wasn't. The hard part was finding a single company I trusted.

My visit to one of the biggest names in personalised books took all of two minutes, because I realised quite quickly there was nothing personal about it. Swap the name, swap nothing else. Others wrote beautifully, I'll give them that, but beautifully about things my son couldn't care less about. He likes monster trucks. You're offering me a story about Harriet Tubman. A wonderful story, for a different child, on a different day, and ideally one he chose.

And then there were the others. One service suggested, genuinely, that I send my child's photograph to a WHATSAPP NUMBER, and that my book would arrive in eight to twelve working days.

Read that again. A photo of my son. To a WhatsApp number. Into the hands of whoever happens to hold that phone.

That was the moment the search ended and something else began. Because the questions I was left holding wouldn't put themselves down. How can I trust that level of flippancy with my child's likeness? How can I accept that level of impersonality with my child's imagination? How is it possible that the two things a personalised book is, my child's face and my child's world, were the two things nobody seemed to take seriously?

I couldn't answer it. So we set a different goal entirely: build the product I'd been searching for. One fundamentally safe enough that I would put my own children's faces in it.

Not safe as a feature. Safe as the foundation.

What actually happens to your child's photo

If you're asking “is it safe to upload my child's photo to an AI app?”, you deserve a plain answer, not a reassuring paragraph. So here is exactly what happens inside Once Upon a Me:

Your child's photo does one job. It is used to create their story avatar, a stylised, illustrated likeness of your child. That is all. The avatar is what appears in every book; the photograph itself never gets printed, never gets shared, never becomes the product.

Then we hold it for 24 hours. For you, not for us. Once the avatar is created, we keep the photo for one more day, purely in case you change your mind and want to redo it. After that, it's gone. Deleted from our systems automatically. Not “deactivated”, not “archived”, deleted. We built the deletion process with its own safety checks so that a photo cannot quietly linger because someone forgot to empty a folder. The system empties the folder. Every hour. Without being asked.

The photo's journey is short on purpose. It travels one narrow, vetted path to do its one job. It is not passed around a long chain of services, and it is never sold. The books your child reads are built from the avatar (the illustration), not the photograph.

That's the whole story. And if any company can't give you their version of those three paragraphs in plain English, if the answer lives vaguely in a privacy policy, or worse, at the other end of a WhatsApp number, I'd gently suggest that's your answer too.

The standard is simple: our own children

Here's the honest truth about why the rule is 24 hours and not 30 days, and why the photo does one job and not several: because every one of these decisions was made by a parent who had just been asked to send his son's face to a stranger's phone. I wasn't designing for a user persona. I was designing for the version of me sat on the sofa that evening, thumb hovering, asking who exactly is on the other end of this?

That question deserved a better answer than the market was giving it. So that became the company.

We exist to build mirrors; stories that portal your child into worlds they're yet to experience. Their first day of school, their first trip to the dentist, their first night in a big bed, with their own face leading the way.

Because first times aren't so scary when you've been there before.