The World's First Social App that
gets you all your photos from friends
Where your friends give you all your photos to get theirs
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PicSee is the World's First
Mutual Photo Sharing App
that's Powered by AI
Friends give you your pics to get theirs from you
Photo Sharing Apps
and why they don't work
Did you know that there are over 15 trillion photos in the world, and 2 trillion new photos are being taken every year?!
A majority of them have been clicked using mobile devices. Of all the photos, everyone has the highest affinity towards photos that have their face in them. Everyone wants the photos that have them in it. It’s natural. However, the inherent nature of the person who clicked the photo is to feel lazy to share someone else’s photo with that person. Unless pushed to do so. There’s no incentive to share. The sender gets nothing in return.
This results in you not seeing / getting thousands of photos that have you in them. And you having thousands of photos of your closest friends that you’ve still not shared with them either. The problem is at both ends.
With something as personal and important as photos, it’s important to solve this problem. We spend a lot of time, effort and money to build these memories over decades. The least we want is to be able to see them and have them with us. We do have photo sharing tools to enable photo sharing, however the problem doesn’t lie with the technology as much as it lies in the incentives for the sender. They are lazy, forget, and most importantly, get nothing in return. It’s important to create the right incentive for them to share. Or to remove the manual nature of the sharing.
We think we’ve found the best solution to this problem with PicSee. Let’s tell you more about how we solve this.
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Most of your photos have been taken by friends. 99% of your photos will be found in the phone of a person known to you.
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In most cases both of you will have photos of each other.
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PicSee scans your camera gallery to help you find your friends who may have your photos. It finds your friends whose photos you have. In most cases they will have your photos too.
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We also capture your face so we know what you look like. We use facial recognition for both these tasks. This is where the AI comes in.
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PicSee will then show you the list of friends and the number of photos it found of your friends. It then lets you invite each friend with a personalized invite that invites your friend to the app by saying “Hey, I have 75 of your photos. Come to PicSee to get these from me.”
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On PicSee if your friend wants to receive their photos from you, they need to agree to send you yours. It’s a two-way approval system. This mutual benefit solves the incentive problem that is core to all manual photo sharing apps.
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It gets both of you to approve each other as a trusted person just this one time.
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PicSee automates the entire exchange process by using facial recognition to identify your photo in a friend’s camera gallery and your friend’s face in your camera gallery.
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It then identifies your photos in a friend’s camera gallery and lines them up to be sent to you. Your friend gets a 24 hour review period to send these photos to you. Your friend can cancel sending any photos they don’t feel like sharing in this review period.
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Post which your friend has two choices. They can either send it to you right away by clicking on ‘Send now’ or they can just wait for the 24 hour period upon which the app sends the photos to you as per the 24 hour auto send schedule.
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This way, you get your photos within 24 hours of the photo being found in your friend’s phone. The same process repeats at your end for your friend’s photos.
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No more manual selection and sending of photos. PicSee intelligently identifies faces and enables sending of photos without the need for you to do any of this.
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It ensures that you get thousands of your photos from your closest ones without them having to take any manual steps.
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They come to PicSee to get their photos from you and you land up getting their photos from them.
PicSee is more an AI photo finder than a photo sharing app. It helps you find and get your unseen photos from friends, with their permission. But without any manual effort! It’s the first such AI photo finder in the world that is completely automated yet gives the user full control on who they want to share photos with and which ones.
There are many differences between a photo finder app like PicSee and photo sharing apps. Here’s some explanation of how these differ.
Key differences between a Photo Sharing & AI Photo Finder App
Photo sharing apps vs PicSee's AI Photo Finder
Photo sharing apps have been around for decades now. Be it Google Photos, Apple Photos, WhatsApp, SnapChat, iMessage etc. There are tons of them apart from these too. However, what’s missing in most of these is the intent for the sender to send.
The problem doesn’t lie in the technology as much as it lies in the psychology of sending. The sender (the person that clicked the photo) has no great reason to share photos with the person in the photo. They get nothing in return. Hence a lot of the sharing that could happen doesn’t happen even though we have the tools.
PicSee has tried to solve this problem by making a tool that is geared to help everyone receive photos from friends by agreeing to send them theirs. They come to PicSee to get their photos from you and you land up receiving your photos from them. It’s this two way photo exchange that everyone benefits from.
Issues with Photo Sharing
Here’s what we think are some things that are missing in Photo sharing tools, making them difficult to use and being used as often as they should be:
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Photo selection is a manual process. It requires the user to select photos they want to send to a group or a particular person. It puts the pressure of selection and sending on the user who clicked the photos.
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The sender needs to then start sending these photos to different group(s) of people either through WhatsApp or through Google Photos / Apple Photos. It needs the sender to do multiple clicks to send these. In many cases it either needs you to have the phone number of the e-mail of the person you will be sharing photos with. While many folks may have each other’s contact details, in a world that exchanges instagram handles with each other, depending on contact details may not be the future.
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The person that receives the photo receives a pixelated and compressed photo many times. Leaving them wanting more from the exchange.
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The photo sharing process lacks the incentive that the sender needs to share photos with a single or a multiple group of friends. They get nothing in return. If lucky, someone will say ‘Thank you’. They also know that the person they just photos to, has their photos but hasn’t sent it to them yet. That adds to the annoyance of not receiving photos, even though the user is taking the effort to send photos proactively.
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Photo sharing has not been automated yet. It needs to be done as a conscious action every time you click a photo. Usually photos are clicked in a social setting. When you’re in that social setting, you just want to keep clicking without thinking about sharing these. Once the event is over, sharing these photos is not top of mind. Even if people follow up to receive their photos from you. You may be busy or lazy. You may forget to send and others will give up instead of following up and nagging you constantly. This is what happens 95% of the time. And we miss out on thousands of photos and memories that we should have had.
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In photo sharing just because you shared your photo with a friend doesn’t mean that they’ll share your photos with you. It’s a one way street with a one way action. The action of sharing photos with friends makes you feel like you don’t have a strong reason to keep doing this.
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Even though some photo sharing apps have shared albums, the issue is that it’s not a very intuitive flow. Too many clicks and too technical a flow. It also doesn’t ensure that the other person will switch this feature on just because you switched it on from your end. Again, giving the sender little incentive to use this feature.
All in all, even though the technology for sharing photos has existed for many decades, the true incentive that can enable a seamless exchange of photos, hasn’t really been solved yet.
PicSee has decided to change that with its extremely intuitive flow and crystal clear incentives for both parties - the sender as well as the receiver. They both get to receive their respective photos from each other without any manual effort. A photo finder tool like PicSee will be the future of exchanging and bartering photos with each other.