In the last few years, photo-sharing apps have capitalized on the idea that Instagram has become too curated, creating spaces for users to share unfiltered photos from their camera rolls. Locket tapped into lockscreen-based sharing, Retro took a photo journaling route, and Yope is building Instagram for private groups.
Now, Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Indian social network Koo, which was shut down last year after collapsed buyout talks, is releasing a new photo-sharing app called PicSee. The app, released Thursday, both on iOS and Android, aims to automatically detect and share photos of friends that are in your camera roll without you having to use any messaging system like WhatsApp or Instagram.
Bidawatka said that your friends probably have hundreds of photos of you that you don’t have. Either they forgot to send you those photos, or they themselves have forgotten about those photos. PicSee scan faces in your camera gallery and picks out photos of your friends.
“I’ve been thinking about the problem of personal photo sharing for years now,” Bidawatka told TechCrunch over a call. “Last year, after we announced shutdown of Koo, I had time to rethink this problem and work on it again.”
If your friends are on PicSee, you can send them a sharing request. Once they accept, they’ll receive your first batch of photos of them. After that, the app will detect new photos of them in your camera roll and prompt you to send those, too.
If you don’t send them instantly, the app will automatically send those photos to them after 24 hours. Before that, you can review the photos that you are sending and choose not to send some. The photos are stored locally on your device in PicSee’s storage. You can choose to download them to your device storage. Users can also recall photos after they have sent them, which removes the images from PicSee on the receiver’s end.
The company says it has implemented a bunch of privacy controls. The app does all the processing of identifying faces on the device. The company said that while sending photos, it establishes an encrypted connection. The photos are stored on your device, and the company doesn’t store anything in the cloud. Bidawatka said the app also has a filter on NSFW pictures and blocks screenshots.
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PicSee’s biggest challenge may be its selectivity. While it makes sense to have an always-on photo connection with close friends, family, or partners, most people wouldn’t want that level of automatic sharing with everyone they know. That creates a hurdle. Users already send photos to these close contacts through WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, and Snapchat, so PicSee will need to convince them to change their default behavior for a relatively small circle of relationships.
Further, while the app detects photos of your friends on your phone, it doesn’t solve the problem of when someone asks you for a photo you took at an event you went to together, such as a concert, a wedding, or a party.
The company said it wants to address these social engagement features. The app already has a chat feature, which allows people who are in a picture to leave comments under it.
The company said it is also working on allowing users to create and manage albums, suggest albums, remove duplicates, and integrate with Google Photos/iCloud. The company also wants to use its face detection tech for videos on your camera roll.
Billion Hearts, the company behind the PicSee app, raised $4 million in funding last year, led by Blume Ventures with participation from General Catalyst and Athera Ventures.
