In the past few years, photo-sharing apps have capitalized on the idea that Instagram has become too curated, creating space for users to share unfiltered photos from their camera rolls. Medallion took advantage of lock screen-based sharing, Retro took a photo journal route, and Yope builds Instagram for private groups.
Now Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Indian social network Koo, which was shut down last year after collapsed buyout negotiations, is releasing a new photo-sharing app called PicSee. The app, released Thursday on both iOS and Android, aims to automatically detect and share photos of friends who are in your camera roll without the need to use any messaging system like WhatsApp or Instagram.
Bidawatka said your friends probably have hundreds of photos of you that you don’t. Either they forgot to send you those pictures, or they forgot the pictures themselves. PicSee scans faces in your camera gallery and selects photos of your friends.
“I’ve been thinking about the problem of personal photo sharing for years now,” Bidawatka told TechCrunch on a call. “Last year, after we announced the shutdown of Koo, I had time to rethink this issue and work on it again.”
If your friends are on PicSee, you can send them a share request. Once they accept, they will receive your first batch of photos of them. Then the app registers new photos of them in your camera roll and asks you to send them too.
If you don’t send them right away, the app will automatically send those photos to them after 24 hours. Before then, you can review the photos you send and choose not to send any. The images are stored locally on your device in PicSee’s storage. You can choose to download them to your device storage. Users can also recall images after sending them, which removes the images from PicSee on the recipient’s end.
The company says it has implemented a lot of privacy controls. The app does all the processing of identifying faces on the device. The company said that while sending images, it establishes an encrypted connection. The images are stored on your device and the company does not store anything in the cloud. Bidawatka said the app also has a filter on NSFW images 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 don’t want that level of automatic sharing with everyone they know. It creates an obstacle. Users already send photos to these close contacts via WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram and Snapchat, so PicSee will have to convince them to change their default behavior for a relatively small circle of relationships.
Additionally, while the app does record 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, like a concert, wedding, or party.
The company said it wants to address these social engagement features. The app already has a chat feature that allows people who are in a photo to post 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 facial recognition technology 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.