In recent 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 harnessed lock screen-based sharing, Retro took a photo recording route, and Yope is building Instagram for private groups.
Now Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Indian social network Koo, which shut down last year after takeover talks collapsed, is launching a new photo-sharing app called PicSee. The app was released on Thursday and both iOS and Androidaims to automatically find and share photos of friends in your camera roll without having 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 photos, or they forgot about those photos themselves. PicSee scans faces in your camera roll and selects photos of your friends.
“I’ve been thinking about the problem of sharing personal photos for years,” Bidawatka told TechCrunch after a call. “Last year, after we announced the closure of Koo, I had time to rethink this problem and rework it.”
If your friends are on PicSee, you can send them a share request. Once they accept, they will receive your first batch of their photos. After that, the app will detect new photos of them in the camera roll and ask you to send them as well.
If you don’t send them immediately, the app will automatically send them those photos after 24 hours. Before that, you can review the photos you send and choose not to send some. Photos are stored locally on your device in PicSee storage. You can choose to download them to your device storage. Users can also recall photos after sending them, which removes the images from PicSee on the receiving end.


The company says it has a bunch of privacy controls in place. The app does all the facial recognition processing on the device. The company said that when sending photos, it creates an encrypted connection. Photos 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 a constant connection of photos with close friends, family or associates, most people wouldn’t want this level of automatic sharing with everyone they know. This creates a barrier. Users already send photos to these close contacts via WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram and Snapchat, so PicSee should convince them to change their default behavior for a relatively small circle of relationships.


Also, while the app finds photos of your friends on your phone, it doesn’t solve the problem 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, which allows people in a photo to leave comments under it.
The company said it is also working on allowing users to create and manage albums, recommend albums, remove duplicates and integrate with Google Photos/iCloud. The company also wants to use face detection technology for videos in your camera roll.
Billions of Heartsthe company behind the PicSee app, raised $4 million in funding last year, led by Blume Ventures with participation from General Catalyst and Athera Ventures.
