Keep your edits safe: backup and recovery

White Room keeps your work in your browser, not on a server. That keeps your photos private, but it also means you are the one who keeps a backup. This guide shows how.

Where your work is kept

When you import a photo, White Room stores a copy of the original, its previews and your edits in the storage of this browser on this device. Edits are saved as you make them, and the history of every photo comes with them. If a tab closes before a change is saved, the next start saves it and tells you.

This storage belongs to this browser and this website. Another browser, another device, or the same browser in a private window does not see it.

What can remove it

• Clearing browsing data or the data of this site in your browser settings.
• Closing a private or incognito window, which deletes what it stored.
• A device that runs out of space: the browser may clear site data to free it, unless the site may keep its data. White Room asks your browser for that once.
• Safari may clear the data of a website that you have not used for a while.

White Room never changes the original files on your disk. Keep them.

Back up your edits

1. Choose File › Back Up Edits….
2. Save the file, named like white-room-edits-2026-10-10.json, somewhere outside the browser: your documents folder, a USB drive or a cloud folder you trust.

The backup holds the edits, history, flags and ratings of every photo, but not the photos themselves. It stays small, and you can make one as often as you like. If the history is very long, the backup keeps the most recent steps of each photo and tells you so.

Restore your edits

1. Choose File › Restore Edits… and pick the backup file.
2. White Room checks the whole file before it writes anything. A backup made by a newer version of White Room is refused with a reason, so it never loses data it does not understand.
3. The photos come back with their edits. A photo whose original is not in the browser is marked as missing it.

Link photos to their originals

To edit or export a photo whose original is missing, open it and choose File › Locate Original…, then pick the original file. White Room accepts only the same file it imported: the same size and the same content. Any other file changes nothing.

Move your work to another browser or device

1. Back up your edits in the old browser.
2. Copy the backup file and your original photos to the new device.
3. Open White Room there, restore the backup, and locate the originals.

Several tabs

White Room can be open in several tabs, but only one of them edits at a time. The others show your photos read-only and say so, so two tabs never overwrite each other's work.