Retro, a photo-sharing app for friends, lets you ‘time-travel’ through your camera roll

Retro, a friend-focused photo-sharing app with roughly a million users, is adding a new feature that lets you time-travel through your old photo memories from your phone’s camera roll. While the app today offers a way to share photos of what’s happening during your week with a private group of friends, or create shared albums, this latest addition, dubbed “Rewind,” is private to you — unless you choose to share the photos with others.

Retro’s co-founder, Nathan Sharp, explains that the idea for Rewind was inspired by a feature the app already offered and was proving popular.

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

However, that option wasn’t accessible to newer Retro users, since 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 opportunity to go time-travel through your memories in this way,” said Sharp, who had spent over 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 CTO, in 2022.

“The other problem that we saw was that people take more photos than ever, but they actually do less with that volume of photos than ever before. So it’s almost as if those photos go into the ether,” he added.

The addition, to some extent, is pushback against the growing trend of AI-generated content and “for you” feed-style algorithms.

“As people engage with those platforms more and more, something that has to be true and will 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 the intended audience.”

Although nearly half (45.7%) of Retro’s users participate in the app on a daily basis, the Rewind feature could boost that engagement even higher.

To try Rewind, you can either launch it from the end of the row of shared photos, just past the “this week in” card, or from its more prominent position as the middle tab in the bottom navigation bar.

When launched, there’s a haptic response as the screen starts cycling through the older photos pulled from your camera roll. These memories aren’t being shared, but you can tap on the share icon if you feel inspired to send them to a friend or post them. In addition, you can opt to hide photos you’d rather not see (like those of an ex), or tap a “dice” icon to be taken to a random memory instead.

As the iPod-inspired dial clicks back into your past, you’ll feel a subtle vibration as each new memory loads. You can also spin the dial to move forward or backward in time, watching the photos from months and years past flip by on the screen, pausing at those you want to view longer or share.

You can press and hold on any photo to see it uncropped, and when you share a photo, a timestamp is added at the bottom so friends will understand it’s not a new pic.

While screenshots won’t appear in this photo archive, other photos — like those of receipts or whiteboards at work will show up, as they could still be interesting memories to 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 to look back at older photo memories is hardly 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 for its “On This Day” feature, and photo-hosting services like Google Photos and Apple Photos added memories features of their own.

Still, Sharp doesn’t believe these will be direct competitors for Retro. Facebook, over the years, has downranked friends’ content as its feed became filled with links, news, and ads. Meanwhile, people tend to think of Apple’s and Google’s photo apps more as utilities for managing and storing photos, not as social apps like Retro.