Instagram’s polished vibe has sparked a wave of apps that bring back casual, real-life photo sharing. Locket leans on the lock screen, Retro favors photo journaling, and Yope keeps it within private groups. Enter PicSee, a new app built to make sure you actually receive the photos your friends took of you—without chasing them down in DMs.
Created by Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Indian social network Koo, PicSee is now available on iOS and Android. The idea is simple: your camera roll likely has hundreds of photos of friends, and their phones have just as many of you. PicSee scans your gallery on-device to find faces of friends and automatically offers to share those photos with them.
Here’s how it works:
– Add your friends on PicSee and send a sharing request.
– When they accept, they instantly get a curated batch of photos you have of them.
– As you take new pictures, the app detects fresh shots of those friends and prompts you to share.
– If you don’t act, PicSee auto-sends after 24 hours so great memories don’t get lost. You can review the set first and choose not to send certain images.
– Photos live locally inside PicSee on your device. You can also save them to your main camera roll.
– Sent something by mistake? You can recall photos, which removes them from the recipient’s PicSee.
Privacy and safety are central to the pitch. Face detection runs on your device, not in the cloud. Transfers use encrypted connections. The company says it doesn’t store your photos on its servers, includes an NSFW filter, and blocks screenshots for added protection.
PicSee’s biggest hurdle may be behavior change. Always-on sharing makes sense for close friends, family, or partners, but many people already default to WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, or Snapchat for those circles. PicSee needs to be compelling enough to replace those habits. Another gap: when someone asks for event photos from a concert, wedding, or party, the app doesn’t yet specialize in bundling and sharing by occasion.
The team is building toward that. PicSee already includes a chat where people who appear in a picture can leave comments. Upcoming features in development include:
– Create and manage shared albums
– Smart album suggestions
– Duplicate detection and cleanup
– Integration with Google Photos and iCloud
– Extending the same face-detection magic to videos
PicSee is developed by Billion Hearts, which raised $4 million last year led by Blume Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst and Athera Ventures.
If you’re constantly missing photos friends took of you, PicSee aims to fix that with automatic, privacy-first sharing that just happens. It’s a fresh take on photo sharing for the people who matter most, available now on iOS and Android.
