Beyond the Feed: Can PicSee Solve Our Shared Photo Anxiety and Outsmart the Algorithm?

Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of the defunct Indian social network Koo, has launched PicSee, a new photo-sharing app that aims to solve the common problem of friends and family having photos of each other they never share. The app uses on-device face recognition to scan a user’s camera roll, and after a mutual connection is established, it automatically detects and sends photos of friends to them, even employing a 24-hour auto-send feature to overcome user inertia.

While PicSee emphasizes a privacy-focused, local-processing model and offers recall functions, its major challenges include overcoming user privacy concerns, convincing people to change their default sharing behaviors on platforms like WhatsApp, and navigating the social selectivity of deciding with whom to establish such an intimate, always-on sharing relationship. 

Beyond the Feed: Can PicSee Solve Our Shared Photo Anxiety and Outsmart the Algorithm? 

Meta Description: The co-founder of defunct Koo launches PicSee, a new app promising automatic photo sharing with friends. We dive into the problem of digital photo clutter, the privacy implications, and whether it can change our ingrained sharing habits. 

The Digital Shoebox Dilemma: We’re Drowning in Photos We Never Share 

Think about the last wedding, birthday party, or casual weekend hangout you attended. How many photos were taken? Dozens? Hundreds? Now, think about how many of those photos you actually received. A handful, perhaps, shared in a frantic burst on a WhatsApp group that quickly disappeared into the digital ether. 

This is the modern “digital shoebox dilemma.” Our camera rolls are overflowing with thousands of photos—blurry shots, candid moments, and near-identical group poses—but the process of curating, selecting, and sending them to the right people is a chore we perpetually postpone. We live in an age of unprecedented photographic abundance, yet our actual shared memories are often scarce. 

Into this frustration steps PicSee, a new photo-sharing app launched by Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of the now-defunct Indian social network Koo. Bidawatka’s new venture isn’t just another Instagram clone or a Locket-like widget. It’s a bold, almost intrusive, attempt to solve this dilemma by automating the act of sharing itself. But can an app that automatically sends photos of your friends from your camera roll navigate the complex waters of privacy, social nuance, and ingrained user behavior? 

From Koo’s Ashes to PicSee: A Pivot to Personal Connection 

The shadow of Koo, the Indian microblogging platform that aimed to rival Twitter (now X), looms over this launch. After buyout talks collapsed last year, Koo shut down, a sobering reminder of the immense challenges in building a social network from the ground up. 

Bidawatka’s pivot from a public, text-based social network to a private, photo-centric app is significant. It signals a shift in the tech landscape. The battle for the public square is brutal and dominated by giants. The new frontier, it seems, is in the intimate, small-scale spaces of our personal relationships. Instead of trying to build a town square, PicSee is trying to build a smarter, connected family photo album. 

“I’ve been thinking about the problem of personal photo sharing for years now,” Bidawatka told TechCrunch. This isn’t a fly-by-night idea; it’s a calculated move into a space where the problem is universally felt, but a truly elegant solution remains elusive. 

How PicSee Works: The Promise of “Always-On” Sharing 

PicSee’s core proposition is deceptively simple: your friends have photos of you, and you have photos of them, but you never see them. The app aims to bridge that gap through a combination of on-device intelligence and automated sharing. Here’s the process: 

• Face-Scanning & Permission-Based Sharing: The app scans the faces in your camera roll locally (a key privacy point we’ll return to). It then identifies photos of your friends. Crucially, you can’t just start sending photos to anyone. You must send a “sharing request,” which the other person must accept. This establishes a two-way, consent-based sharing relationship. 

• The 24-Hour Rule: This is PicSee’s most controversial and innovative feature. Once a connection is established, the app will detect new photos of your friend and prompt you to send them. If you don’t act, it will automatically send them after 24 hours. This “nudge” is designed to overcome the inertia of “I’ll send it later.” 

• Human Oversight and Recall: Before the 24-hour window expires, you can review the batch of photos and de-select any you’d rather not share. Even after sending, you can “recall” a photo, which deletes it from the recipient’s PicSee storage. This safety valve is critical for mitigating social blunders. 

• Local-First, Encrypted Architecture: PicSee claims all face-matching happens on your device. Photos are stored locally within the app and are only transmitted over an encrypted connection. The company states it doesn’t store anything in the cloud, positioning itself as a privacy-conscious alternative to platforms that mine photo data for advertising. 

The Core Challenges: Privacy, Social Nuance, and Changing Defaults 

While the technology is impressive, PicSee’s success hinges on overcoming profound human and behavioral challenges. 

1. The Privacy Paradox: An app that constantly scans my camera roll and automatically shares photos is a privacy hawk’s nightmare. PicSee’s local-processing model is a strong counter-argument, but the perception risk remains. The “NSFW filter” and screenshot blocking are good features, but they are not infallible. Trust isn’t just about technology; it’s about believing the company behind it will uphold its promises, especially one emerging from a high-profile shutdown like Koo’s. Users will need immense reassurance to grant this level of access to their personal lives.
2. The Selectivity Problem: As the original article astutely points out, this is PicSee’s biggest hurdle. Who qualifies for this “always-on” sharing relationship? For most people, that list is vanishingly small: a romantic partner, maybe a best friend, or immediate family. The mental calculus for sharing is complex. You might be happy to automatically share silly candies with your best friend but not the unflattering photo from a bad angle. PicSee forces a binary “on/off” switch on a relationship that is, in reality, a nuanced dial.
3. The “Good Enough” Incumbents: Why do we need PicSee when we have WhatsApp, iMessage, and AirDrop? These platforms are the default for a reason. They are already on our phones, and everyone we know is already on them. PicSee isn’t just asking users to download a new app; it’s asking them to change a deeply ingrained habit for a small subset of their contacts. The value proposition must be overwhelmingly superior to overcome this inertia.

The Untapped Opportunity: Beyond Auto-Sharing 

For PicSee to become more than a niche utility, it must evolve. Its initial feature set is a Trojan horse for solving a broader set of problems. 

• The “Event” Problem: The app currently doesn’t solve the “hey, can you send me the photos from the wedding?” problem. This is a massive opportunity. Future features could use facial recognition and metadata to automatically collate all photos from a specific event (a concert, a vacation) taken by everyone in your PicSee circle, creating a collaborative album without any manual effort. 

• From Sharing to Storytelling: The nascent chat and commenting features hint at this. Photos are the starting point for conversation and reminiscing. By building tools around these shared memories—creating digital scrapbooks, generating “One Year Ago Today” memories, or facilitating group storytelling—PicSee could become a platform for preserving context, not just pixels. 

• Digital Decluttering: The company’s roadmap includes removing duplicates and integrating with cloud services like Google Photos. This positions PicSee as not just a sharing tool, but a full-stack photo management assistant for your personal life—a desperately needed service. 

The Verdict: A Bold Bet on a Felt Need 

PicSee is not for everyone. It’s a high-trust, high-intimacy app that will live or die by its ability to foster a sense of security and genuine utility among its earliest users. It faces a Sisyphean task in challenging the behavioral defaults set by messaging giants. 

However, it is one of the most thoughtful attempts to date at solving a problem that genuinely nags at our digital consciences. We are all hoarders of memories that rightfully belong to others. PicSee dares to ask: what if our devices could be more thoughtful? What if they could help us be better friends, better partners, and better curators of our collective experiences? 

Its success is far from guaranteed, but its premise is powerful. In a tech landscape obsessed with public virality and creator economies, PicSee is a quiet, compelling bet on the value of our private, shared memories. It reminds us that the most important social network isn’t the one with the most users, but the one that best connects you to the people in your photos.