Retroa friend-centric photo-sharing app with about a million users, is adding a new feature that lets you time travel through your old photo memories from your phone’s camera roll. While the app currently offers a way to share photos of what’s happening during your week with a private group of friends or create shared albums, this latest addition, called “Rewind,” is private to you — unless you choose to share the photos with others.
The co-founder of Retro, Nathan Sharpexplains that the idea for Rewind was inspired by a feature the app already offered and was proving popular.
Today, at the end of the row showing the photos your friends shared during the week, there’s a card you can tap that will let you see your own photos from the same week a year ago.
However, this option was not accessible to younger Retro users as they had not yet uploaded enough photos to the app to take advantage of the photo memories feature.
“If you’re a new user, you don’t really have the opportunity to time travel through your memories that way,” said Sharp, who had spent more than six years at Meta working on products like Instagram Stories and Facebook Dating before leaving to found his own photo-sharing startup with Ryan OlsonCTO of Retro, in 2022.
“The other problem we saw was that people are taking more photos than ever before, but they’re actually doing less with that volume of photos than ever before. So it’s almost like those photos are going into the ether,” he added.
The addition, to some extent, goes against the growing trend of AI-generated content and “for you” feed algorithms.
“As people engage with these platforms more and more, one thing that should and will be true is that people will still want to see more of their friends,” says Sharp. “The photos and videos you take should find a place where they can reach the audience you want.”
Although nearly half (45.7%) of Retro users engage with the app on a daily basis, the Rewind feature could boost that engagement even further.
To try Rewind, you can either launch it from the end of the row of shared photos, just after the “this week in” card, or from its more prominent position as a middle tab in the bottom navigation bar.
On startup, there’s a tactile response as the screen begins to cycle through the oldest photos taken from your camera roll. These memories are not shared, but you can tap the share icon if you feel inspired to send them to a friend or post them. Additionally, you can choose to hide photos you’d rather not see (like those of an ex) or tap a dice icon to be taken to a random memory.
As the iPod-inspired dial returns to your past, you’ll feel a subtle vibration as each new memory loads. You can also rotate the dial to move forward or backward in time, watching photos from months and years past on the screen, pausing on the ones you want to see more or share.
You can long-press any photo to see it cut out, and when you share a photo, a timestamp is added to the bottom so friends know it’s not a new photo.
While screenshots won’t appear in this photo archive, other photos will — like those of receipts or whiteboards at work, as they could still be interesting memories for you. (And if you come across a photo you don’t need to keep, deleting it from the app will also delete it from your camera roll.)
The idea of looking back at older photographic memories is hardly new, of course.
In the past, a startup called Timehop popularized the idea of doing more with our growing digital photo archives by allowing users to revisit old photos through its simple mobile app. Later, Facebook copied the idea for the “On This Day” feature, and photo hosting services like Google Photos and Apple Photos added their own memories features.
However, Sharp doesn’t think these will be direct competitors for the Retro. Facebook has, over the years, degraded the content of its friends as their feed was filled with links, news and ads. Meanwhile, people tend to think of Apple’s and Google’s photo apps more as photo management and storage utilities, not social networking apps like Retro.
