You will not receive any help selecting these photos either. The company doesn’t use AI to evoke or resurface memories like pretty much every other photography app does. “There is a big difference between passive memories and actively recording the moments that matter to you,” says Retro founder Nathan Sharp in an email.
The retro team consists of six former Instagrammers. Their original intention was to create a better Instagram, a place where you can share snaps and comments with people you truly care about. The Diaries feature expands on this by allowing you to share this content with a larger group of people.
For example, if you are a parent, you can create a diary for each of your children. You can post photos in this diary and share them with grandparents. You can then share public links to this magazine via Instagram or Facebook. People you aren’t friends with on Retro will see your diaries as curated photo albums.
“We wanted to highlight the ongoing use case,” Sharp said. “This isn’t just a photo dump. This creates something you can look back on in the future.”
Shine’s use case is similar. It’s aimed at people of multiple generations with different phones who want to pool photos related to similar topics or events. (Even the seemingly dated color choices and app design seem to be a deliberate throwback to an earlier time.) Let’s say you’re attending a baby shower. You can create a baby shower album and add photos in two separate modes. In Magic Mode, Shine’s AI selects images for you, or you can add photos manually. Then you can share the album with anyone you choose and they can also add images.
As we discussed in our review of the feature, Apple’s Journal app also prompts you to write regularly about your day. You can schedule reminders and enable prompts. You can insert photos, places and voice notes. Of course, this feature is only available on iPhones; Beyond that, it’s not much different than some other, older apps that also offer journaling services (WIRED has a few more suggestions here). Apple is unveiling the feature as part of its new suite of mental health services.
Paper trail
How does You Creating or sharing memories? Like most people, I share my photos haphazardly: in photo batches sent via SMS to group chats on various messaging apps, in shared Google Photos folders, in Instagram posts, or occasionally in a Story or on a Facebook Reel. It would be really nice if every single person I know could access the same app. Unfortunately, every person in my life also has other people in their life, so I suspect this will end up the same as if everyone tried to force everyone else to use Slack, Discord, or WhatsApp. I half-heartedly wrote retro invitations to a few friends, but only received a disinterested “What’s that?” In response.
Sharp also suggested keeping a private journal with my husband, but unfortunately, as 6 and 9 year olds, we are too busy collecting memories to document them thoroughly (my spouse also hates social media). I’ve been scrolling through our text messages for possible snaps, but I really need to bring in an AI to help me decide which one of our constant back-and-forths of “Where are you?”, “Where did you go?” and “Did you Got garlic bread?” Moments worth remembering.