Last updated: 25 October 2026 · Applies to the ShotCut video editor for Windows, macOS and Linux.
- ShotCut runs on your own computer. Your videos, recordings, transcripts and projects never leave it.
- We do not collect, store, sell or share any of your data. There are no accounts, ads, analytics, crash reports or tracking.
- ShotCut goes online only to download its own parts: on the first start, and once for the AI background model.
What ShotCut handles, and why
Everything below is processed on your computer and is not sent to us or to anyone else.
| Information | Why | Where it stays |
|---|---|---|
| Video, audio, images and subtitle files you import | To show, edit and export them | Where you keep them; ShotCut reads them in place and does not copy them into a project |
| The speech in your media, turned into words with timings | To make captions and to edit by text | In your .shotcut project file, wherever you save it |
| Working copies: preview copies, transparent copies after background removal, reversed clips | To play and export what you edited | ShotCut's data folder on your computer |
| Settings (tool paths, encoder, models) | To remember your choices | ShotCut's data folder on your computer |
| Exported videos and caption files | The files you asked for | The folder you chose when saving |
The data folder is %APPDATA%\ShotCut on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/ShotCut on macOS and ~/.config/ShotCut on Linux.
Speech recognition and AI run offline
Transcription uses the open-source Whisper speech model through faster-whisper, and background removal uses open-source U²-Net models through onnxruntime. Both run on your computer's processor. No audio, picture or text is sent to an online service.
Network requests
ShotCut has no server and sends nothing to its developer. It downloads its own parts from these public sources:
| When | What | From |
|---|---|---|
| First start | Node.js | nodejs.org |
| First start | The editor's packages and Electron | The npm registry and GitHub |
| First start | Python and its packages (through uv) | GitHub and the Python Package Index (pypi.org) |
| First start | FFmpeg | GitHub (Windows) or ffmpeg.martin-riedl.de (macOS and Linux) |
| First start | The Whisper speech model | Hugging Face (huggingface.co) |
| First use of AI background removal | The background model you picked | GitHub |
These are ordinary downloads. Like any download, they show the source your IP address and a basic description of the downloader, and that site's own privacy policy applies. Your media and projects are never part of them. After setup, ShotCut works with the internet switched off.
Downloading ShotCut itself from GitHub, and links you click to GitHub or this site, follow those sites' own policies.
Storage and deletion
- Your projects, exports and caption files are normal files. You control them like any other file.
- To remove everything, delete the ShotCut folder and its data folder (above). Nothing is installed anywhere else, and nothing needs admin rights.
Children
ShotCut does not knowingly handle any personal information from anyone, including children, because it collects nothing.
Changes to this policy
If the way ShotCut handles data changes, this page will be updated and the date above will change.
Contact
Questions about this policy: andrew.ctyprosoft@gmail.com