RetroThe photo-sharing app with about a million users is adding a new feature that lets you travel back in time through old memories with photos saved in your phone's camera roll. While the app currently lets you share photos of what's going on throughout the week with a private group of friends or create collaborative albums, the newest addition called “Rewind” is private to you – unless you choose to share photos with others.
Co-founder of Retro, Nathan Sharpexplains that the idea for Rewind was inspired by a feature already offered in the app and was proving popular.
Today, at the end of the row containing photos shared by your friends during the week, there is a card that you can tap that will allow you to view your own photos from the same week a year ago.
However, this option wasn't available to newer Retro users because they hadn't 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 ability to time travel through your memories this 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 Meta Ryan Olsontechnical director of Retro, in 2022
“The other problem we've seen is that people are taking more photos than ever before, but they're actually taking fewer photos of that number of photos than ever before. It's almost as if those photos disappeared into the ether,” he added.
The addition goes some way to bucking the growing trend of AI-generated content and algorithms in a “for you” newsfeed style.
“As people use these platforms more and more, it must be and will be true that people will continue to want to see more of their friends,” says Sharp. “The photos and videos you take will need to find a place where they can reach your target audience.”
Although almost half (45.7%) of Retro users use the app daily, the scroll feature can further increase this engagement.
To try the Scroll option, you can launch it from the end of the row of shared photos, just behind the “this week in” tab, or from a more prominent position as the middle tab in the bottom navigation bar.
Once activated, there is a touch response as the screen begins to scroll through older photos downloaded from your camera roll. These memories are not shared, but you can click the share icon if you feel like sending them to a friend or posting them. Additionally, you can hide photos you don't want to see (e.g. photos of your ex), or click the “dice” icon to take you to a random memory instead.
When the iPod-inspired dial turns back to the past, you'll feel a subtle vibration as each new memory loads. You can also turn the dial to move forward or backward in time, watching photos from previous months and years scroll across the screen, stopping on those you want to view longer or share.
You can press and hold any photo to view it without cropping, and when you share a photo, a timestamp will be added at the bottom so your friends understand it's not a new photo.
Although screenshots will not appear in this photo archive, other photos, such as bills or whiteboards at work, will appear because they may 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 older photographic memories is of course not new.
In the past, a startup called Timehop popularized the idea of doing more with our growing digital photo archives by allowing users to revisit old photos using a 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 their own Memories features.
Despite this, Sharp does not believe that these will be direct competitors of Retro. Facebook has been downgrading friends' content for years as its feed has become filled with links, news and ads. Meanwhile, people see Apple and Google's photo apps more as photo management and storage tools, rather than social media apps like Retro.
