The co-founder of Indian social network Koo launches a new photo-sharing app

In 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 leveraged lock-screen-based sharing, Retro took a photo diary route, and Yope is building an Instagram for private collections.

Now, Mayank Bidwatka, co-founder of Indian social network Koo, which was shut down last year after acquisition talks collapsed, is launching a new photo-sharing app called PicSee. The app, which was released on Thursday, on iOS and Android, aims to automatically detect and share photos of friends in your camera roll without having to use any messaging system like WhatsApp or Instagram.

Your friends probably have hundreds of photos of you that you don’t have, Bedawatka said. Either they forgot to send you those photos, or they forgot those photos themselves. PicSee saves faces to your camera roll and takes photos of your friends.

“I’ve been thinking about the problem of personal photo sharing for years now,” Bedawatka told TechCrunch over a phone call. “Last year, after we announced the closure of Koo, I had time to rethink this issue and work on it again.”

If your friends are on PicSee, you can send them a sharing request. Once they are accepted, they will receive their first batch of photos. After that, the app will detect new photos of them in your camera roll and prompt you to send them as well.

If you don’t send them right away, the app will automatically send those photos to them after 24 hours. Before that, you can review the photos you send and choose not to send some. Photos are stored locally on your device in PicSee storage. You can choose to download them to your device storage. Users can also remember photos after sending them, removing the photos from PicSee on the receiving device.

The company says it has implemented a set of privacy controls. The app does all the facial recognition processing on the device. The company said that while sending images, it creates an encrypted connection. The photos are stored on your device, the company doesn’t store anything in the cloud. The app also has a filter for NSFW images and blocks screenshots, Bedawatka said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing PicSee is its selectivity. While it makes sense to have constant photo connections with close friends, family, or partners, most people don’t want that level of spontaneous sharing with everyone they know. This creates an obstacle. Users already send photos to these close contacts through WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram and Snapchat, so PicSee will need to convince them to change their default behavior for a relatively small circle of relationships.

Furthermore, while the app detects photos of your friends on your phone, it doesn’t solve the problem when someone asks you for a photo you took at an event you went to together, like a concert, wedding, or party.

The company said it wants to address these social sharing features. The app already has a chat feature, which allows people in the photo to leave comments underneath 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 also wants to use face detection technology for videos on your camera roll.

Billion Hearts, the company behind PicSee, raised $4 million in funding last year, led by Blume Ventures with participation from General Catalyst and Athera Ventures.