Retro, an app for sharing photos with friends, lets you “time travel” through your camera roll

Retro, a friend-focused photo-sharing app with nearly a million users, is adding a new feature that lets you time travel through old photo memories from your phone’s camera roll. While today the app offers a way to share photos of what’s happening during the 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 photos with others.

Nathan Sharp, co-founder of Retro, explains that the idea for Rewind was inspired by a feature the app already offered that had proven popular.

Today, at the end of the row that displays photos your friends shared during the week, there’s a card you can tap that will let you view your own photos from the same week a year ago.

However, this option was not available to new Retro users, since 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 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 Olson, Retro’s chief technology officer, in 2022.

“The other problem we’ve seen is that people are taking more photos than ever before, but they’re actually using that volume of photos less than ever before. So it’s as if these photos are going into the ether,” he added.

This addition is, to some extent, a counter to the growing trend of AI-generated content and “for you” feed-style algorithms.

“As people engage with these platforms more and more, the thing that has to be true and will continue to 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 your target audience.”

Although nearly half of Retro users (45.7%) engage with the app daily, a rewind feature could boost that engagement even further.

To try out the rewind, you can either launch it from the end of the row of shared photos, after the This Week card, or from its more prominent position as the middle tab in the bottom navigation bar.

When you turn it on, there’s a tactile response when the screen starts scrolling through old photos pulled from your camera roll. These memories are not shared, but you can tap the share icon if you feel inspired to send it to a friend or post it. Additionally, you can choose to hide photos you don’t want to see (such as photos of your ex), or tap the “dice” icon to be taken to a random memory stick instead.

As the iPod-inspired disc returns to your past, you’ll feel a slight vibration as each new memory loads. You can also rotate the dial to move forward or backward in time, see photos from past months and years on the screen, and pause on photos you want to view longer or share.

You can tap and hold on any photo to see it without cropping, and when you share a photo, a timestamp is added at the bottom so friends understand it’s not a new photo.

Although screenshots won’t appear in this photo archive, other photos – such as photos of receipts or whiteboards at work – will, as they can 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 old photo memories is not new, of course.

In the past, a startup called Timehop ​​popularized the idea of ​​doing something more with our growing digital photo archives by allowing users to revisit old photos through its simple mobile app. Later, Facebook copied the idea of ​​the On This Day feature, and photo hosting services like Google Photos and Apple Photos added Memories features of their own.

However, Sharp doesn’t think these will be direct competitors to the Retro. Facebook, over the years, has downgraded friends’ content as its feed became filled with links, news, and ads. Meanwhile, people tend to think of Apple and Google’s photo apps as photo management and storage utilities, not as social apps like Retro.