Where your AI images and videos actually live
Sora's gallery lasted seven months. What seven popular tools really do with your creations, and the thirty-minute fix.
On April 26, 2026, OpenAI closed the Sora app and website. Every video its users had made over the previous seven months now sits behind one sunset page with an Export button and a plain warning: once the export window passes, OpenAI “will permanently delete any data associated with your use of Sora”. People who downloaded their videos still have them. People who trusted the library are on a deadline they may never have seen.
If you generate images or videos with AI tools, this is worth five minutes of your attention, because nearly every tool works the way Sora did: your creations live in the provider’s gallery, behind the provider’s login, under retention rules you have probably never read. This post reads those rules for seven popular tools, shows what actually deletes your work, and makes the case for the boring alternative: files, on a disk you control. We build a desktop app that works that way, so we have a horse in this race; the receipts below are from the providers’ own pages, and you can check every one.
Your gallery is a feature, not a place
None of the major generation tools saves your work to your computer. ChatGPT auto-saves every generated image to its Images library; getting one onto your disk is a manual Save, image by image. Gemini keeps each image inside the chat that generated it, with a download button that returns 1K resolution on the free tier and 2K on paid plans. Midjourney routes everything to its web gallery, whether you generated on the site or in Discord. Runway files your outputs into a cloud Assets library. The pattern is universal: the default home of your work is their server, and your disk is the exception you have to ask for.
It helps to be precise about what a gallery is. It is not a folder. It is a view over rows in the provider’s database, rendered by an interface the provider can redesign, merge, or retire at will. Google demonstrated the fluidity in February 2026 when it folded Whisk and ImageFX into Flow, with a migration window for moving your old projects across. OpenAI rebuilt its image library twice in eight months, launching the Library in April 2025 and relaunching it as a dedicated Images home in December. A place holds still. A feature is whatever this quarter’s roadmap says it is.
Seven tools, seven different deals
Read the actual policies and the surprise is how differently each tool treats the same question. There is no industry standard for what happens to your work; there is a patchwork of defaults, and some of them delete.
Google’s is the quietest. Gemini’s generated media inherits the retention of the chat around it, and Gemini Apps activity auto-deletes after 18 months by default. You can set 3 or 36 months, or turn auto-delete off, but the default is a countdown. Turn activity saving off entirely and it drops to 72 hours. An image you generated in early 2025 and never touched again may already be gone, not through any incident, just policy working as designed.
OpenAI couples your images to your chats. The only documented way to remove an image from the library is to delete the conversation that created it, which then purges permanently within 30 days. Housekeeping your chat history therefore deletes artwork, a coupling few users suspect.
Midjourney inverts the problem: it deletes nothing, including when you want it to. “Trashing creations does not delete them,” the docs state; individual deletion does not exist, and trashed images can still surface on the public Explore page, because your gallery is public by default. The only true delete is deleting your entire account. On the bright side, cancellation keeps everything intact for a possible resubscribe.
Runway is the most reasonable of the pack on paper, private by default with per-asset deletion, and assets stay on a cancelled account. But the free tier holds 5GB, and the terms of use reserve the real position: the company “has no obligation to store any of Your Content.” Midjourney’s terms say the quiet part even louder: “Please do not create any dependencies on any attributes of the Services or the Assets.” The vendors are telling you, in writing, not to treat their gallery as an archive.
Kling sits at the far end. Files generated through its API are cleared after 30 days; Alibaba Cloud’s hosted version of the same models gives result links the same 30-day life span and tells developers to download videos promptly. The consumer app publishes no gallery retention number at all; its privacy policy instead reserves “the right to delete your Data without notice” while owing no “compensation for such deletions.” Nor is expiry-by-design exotic: Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator stores your generations for up to 90 days, then they are simply gone.
Shutdowns come with deadlines
Policy deletions are slow and personal. Shutdowns are fast and collective, and the AI industry has been running them on a loop. We kept the obituaries for the products; here the subject is what happened to their users’ stored work.
Sora is the cleanest case study because OpenAI handled it relatively well: an announcement, an export tool, a month of warning before the April 26, 2026 closure. And still the structure of the ending is the same: a deadline, an email you might miss, and permanent deletion for everyone who does. Sora never shipped a bulk download during its lifetime; the export tool arrived with the funeral.
Runway shows the slower version. The company has deprecated its own history relentlessly: the original ML Lab sunset in November 2023, taking users’ custom-trained models with it, and wave after wave of tools and models followed: Gen-2 and Motion Brush in 2025, a long list of Magic Tools and Gen-3 in 2026. Stored assets survived each cut; the ability to make more like them did not. And the hardware cousins are grimmer: when HP bought Humane’s assets in February 2025, the AI Pin’s servers went dark and customers’ cloud data was deleted on a two-week fuse.
Smaller endings are harsher. That Whisk migration from earlier came with a blunt footnote in Google’s own announcement: moving your library to Flow was opt-in, and “any media remaining in a user’s Whisk library after this date will be permanently deleted and will no longer be recoverable.” Seven weeks of notice. Playground AI, once one of the most popular free image generators, pivoted to design tools and deprecated its legacy product in January 2025; its help center now answers the question of where your old images went with “all images created with Board are no longer accessible.”
The pattern to internalize: every cloud gallery eventually mails its users a homework assignment with a due date. The assignment is “download everything you care about.” The due date is chosen by the vendor, announced once, and enforced by deletion.
A file on disk is the boring superpower
Against all of that, consider the least glamorous object in computing: a file in a folder. It opens in every image viewer and video editor ever written. Your operating system indexes it for search. It copies to a backup drive with a drag. It moves between tools without asking either tool’s permission. It works on an airplane, and it works the month after you stop paying for the tool that made it. No retention policy applies to it, because nobody but you retains it.
Scale is on your side too. A generated image is a few megabytes; a month of heavy video work is tens of gigabytes. The 4TB drive in the photo below holds eight times Runway’s 500GB Pro-tier cap, as a one-time purchase instead of a subscription line. Storage is the one part of this problem that got solved decades ago, by the same boring convention every serious creative tool already follows: Photoshop, Premiere, Logic, and Blender all write files and let you keep them.
This is the pattern our own desktop app is built on, and we mention it as a pattern rather than a pitch: every generation lands on your disk as an ordinary file the moment it finishes, with the prompt, model, and provider recorded locally alongside it. Any tool can work this way. The question worth asking of whatever you use is simply whether the file exists on your machine before you asked for it, or only after.
Two honest caveats. First, a disk you control is a disk you can lose; files demand the small discipline of a second copy, which cloud galleries do quietly provide until the day they do not. Second, files fix custody, not privacy. A cloud-generated image originated on the provider’s servers and may persist there under the same retention rules as your chats; downloading your copy does not recall theirs. For work that should never have a server copy at all, local generation is the only complete answer.
Export this week, not shutdown week
The practical takeaway is thirty minutes of downloading, tool by tool, while the exits are open and nothing is on fire. One deadline is live as this post publishes: OpenAI is retiring the DALL·E GPT from ChatGPT on August 30, 2026, so images from that older tool deserve the first pass.
- Midjourney: on the Organize page, click the plus icon beside a date to select that whole day, or use per-folder Download. There is no whole-account export, so work through your history in batches.
- ChatGPT: save images manually as you make them. The official data export does not promise to include generated images, and users have reported image-less exports since May 2025. Never delete a chat whose images you have not saved.
- Gemini: run Google Takeout for Gemini, which covers chats, uploads, and generated media; the download link lasts 7 days. Check your auto-delete setting while you are there.
- Flow: download clips individually as you finish them; there is no Takeout for Flow projects.
- Runway: in Assets, select a range and use Actions, then Download for a ZIP; if a batch stalls, Runway’s own advice is smaller selections.
- Kling: download finished videos from the Assets page as you go. There is no bulk export, and anything fetched through the API disappears after 30 days.
Then give the downloads a home worthy of them: one folder per tool or project, dated subfolders, and the prompt pasted into a text file or the filename while you still remember it. Point your backup tool at the whole tree. From then on, exporting is a habit that costs seconds per session, instead of a rescue mission that costs a weekend when a deprecation email lands.
Ownership is a location
Here is the twist in all this fine print: on paper, you already own your generations. OpenAI’s terms assign you its rights in your outputs. Google claims no ownership of what you create. Midjourney’s terms say you own your assets even after you cancel, and Runway’s disclaim ownership too (while both keep broad licenses to use what you made, Runway’s explicitly covering model training).
But ownership written in a terms page is a promise, and promises are exactly what shutdowns break. The version of ownership that survives a pivot, a redesign, an 18-month timer, or a sunset email is the file on your disk. You own what you possess. Tonight, spend the thirty minutes: download your galleries, put them in folders, and turn the provider’s copy into what it should have been all along, a convenience rather than the only one there is.
Disclaimer: This is general information, not legal advice. Tool licenses, content-usage rights, and platform policies summarized here change frequently and reflect sources available as of August 2026. Verify the current terms of each tool and the rules of each platform or marketplace before publishing commercial work, and consult counsel where real money or rights are at stake.
