Retro, a friend-focused, photo-sharing app with roughly 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 today 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, dubbed “Rewind,” is private to you — unless you choose to share the photos with others.
Retro’s co-founder, Nathan Sharp, explains 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 showcasing the photos your friends shared during the week, there’s a card you can tap that will let you view your own photos from that same week a year ago.
However, that option wasn’t accessible to newer Retro users, since they hadn’t yet uploaded enough photos to the app to take advantage of the photo memories feature.
Image Credits:Retro
“If you’re a new user, you don’t really have the opportunity to go time-travel through your memories in this way,” said Sharp, who had spent over six years at Meta working on products like Instagram Stories and Facebook Dating, before leaving to found his own photo-sharing startup with Ryan Olson, Retro’s CTO, in 2022.
“The other problem that we saw was that people take more photos than ever, but they actually do less with that volume of photos than ever before. So it’s almost as if those photos go into the ether,” he added.
The addition, to some extent, is pushback against the growing trend of AI-generated content and “for you” feed-style algorithms.
“As people engage with those platforms more and more, something that has to be true and will be true is that people will still want to see more of their friends,” Sharp says. “The photos and videos you take will need to find a place where they can reach the intended audience.”
Image Credits:Retro
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