Co-founder of Indian social network Koo releases a new photo sharing app

Over the past 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 on Lockscreen-based sharing, reverse Took a photo journaling route, and Yup Creating Instagram for private groups.

Now, Mayank Vidawatka, co-founder of Indian social network Ku, That closed last year after buyout talks collapsedis releasing a new photo sharing app called PicSee. The app was released on Thursday iOS And AndroidThe goal is to automatically detect and share photos of friends in your camera roll without using a messaging system like WhatsApp or Instagram.

Bidawatka says 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 the photos themselves. PicSee can scan your camera gallery and select your friends’ photos.

“I’ve been thinking about the problem of sharing private photos for a few years now,” Bidawatka told TechCrunch in a call. “Last year, after we announced Ku’s closure, I had time to revisit the issue and work on it again.”

If your friends are on PicSee, you can send them sharing requests. Once they accept, they will get your first batch of photos After that, the app will detect new photos of them in your camera roll and prompt you to send them too.

If you don’t send them immediately, the app will automatically send those photos to them after 24 hours. Before then, you can review the photos you’re sending and choose not to send any Photos are stored locally in PicSee’s storage on your device. You can choose to download them to your device storage Users can also withdraw photos after sending them, which removes the images from PicSee on the receiver’s end.

The company said it has implemented a set of privacy controls. The app does all the face detection processing on the device. The company says that when sending images, it establishes 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 for NSFW images and blocks screenshots.

PicSee’s biggest challenge may be its selectivity. While an always-on photo connection with close friends, family or partners makes sense, most people don’t want this level of automatic sharing with everyone they know. That creates a barrier. Users already send photos to these close contacts via WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, and Snapchat, so PicSee needs to convince them to change their default behavior for their relatively small circle of relationships.

Additionally, while the app recognizes photos of your friends on your phone, it doesn’t solve the problem of someone asking you for a photo you took at an event, such as a concert, wedding, or party you went to.

The company says it wants to address these social engagement features. The app already has a chat feature, which allows people in a picture to comment 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 wants to use its facial recognition technology for videos in your camera roll.

A billion 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.