A camera that saves the photos you never post onto the street where you took them.
Working prototype. Shared photos build a map of places, with no names, likes or followers.
Role
Product designer & developer
Type
iOS · Android · Web
Duration
1 month
Year
2026
Built with
Expo · React Native · Supabase
“Where did my photo go?”
01People take more photos than ever.
02They look at almost none of them again.
03They sink into camera rolls and lose where they were taken.
Research
Where it started
I started Glimpse for myself. I photograph the places I go, but those photos are never posted and rarely opened again: about 20 GB of my 128 GB phone. The photos I go back to have people in them; the photos of places sit untouched. If I feel this way, do other people? I turned to published research to find out.
Stored photos get lost. Parents failed to find almost 40% of their family photos from a year earlier; volume and scattered storage made it worse. [7]
Taking a photo can replace remembering. People remembered less about museum objects they photographed than ones they only looked at. [8]
Much of it is clutter. About 20% of phone storage goes to blurry, dark or duplicate photos, across 6 million users in 45 countries. [6]
Phones fill up. 51% of Americans have deleted photos to free up space, and 36% keep photos in so many places they forget where they are. [5]
But places matter. Over 75% of people save photos of sights and places. [5]
Then and now. A Reddit community for photos of the same places across time has about 845,000 members. [12]
Sharing changes the experience. Taking photos to share, rather than for yourself, lowers enjoyment, because attention shifts to how others will see you. [9]
People get the attention. Instagram photos with faces get 38% more likes and 32% more comments; in memory tests, people are the most memorable images and landscapes among the least. [10] [11]
Where existing apps sit
Every app people already use is either public and built around people, or private and built around one person’s memories. None is public and built around places.
Apps
Public
Built around places
No likes or followers
Layered by time
Takeaway
Instagram, Xiaohongshu, BeRealSocial apps
Yes
No
No
No
Built around people and reactions; an ordinary street feels “not worth posting”.
Apple Photos, Google PhotosPhoto libraries
No
Partly
Yes
No
Well organized, but resurfaced memories are about you.
Camera rolls, map pins, Flickr albumsPersonal archives
Partly
Partly
Partly
No
Kept, but seen by no one, often not even you.
Glimpse
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
An anonymous archive of places, layered by hour and year.
YesPartly, or only some apps in the rowNo
High-level goals that defined my design
01Place over person.
Put places, not people, at the centre: no names, no likes, no followers, just a catalogue number.
02Record over performance.
Give unposted photos meaning by mapping them as memories, pinned to the real places they were taken.
03Time as a dimension.
Show how one place changes by the hour and over the years, through everyone’s photos of it.
Glimpse turns the photos you never post into a living map of places.
Five tabs, each a different way of looking at the same photos.
01Your world.
Every photo you take or keep, on the street where you took it. A year bar shows one year at a time, and everyone’s glimpses are one tap away.
02Search.
Places, cities and the words people use for them.
03Camera.
Works like the iPhone Camera, but the photo goes onto your map instead of your camera roll.
04Now.
One hour per page: swipe to move through the day and around the world, each hour in its own light.
05You.
Private. The space Glimpse has kept off your phone, and each city as a photomosaic that fills in as you go.
First launch, in three cards
What Glimpse is, how it differs from a social feed, and why the archive grows. Then straight into the archive.
What this isHow it’s differentWhy it grows
A glimpse, up close
No name and no likes: a catalogue number, the place, one line, and when and in what light it was taken. Below it, the other layers of the same place and notes from people who know it.
One place, through time
Layers groups everyone’s glimpses of a place into the views people return to, then steps through each view year by year.
20232026
A map and a dictionary
Your world fills in year by year, then spreads across the map. Each city is defined by the words people attach to it.
A camera that files by place
It shoots like the iPhone camera, but each photo goes onto the street where you took it, not into the camera roll. AI rates every shot as it lands: high-quality photos you allow to be shared go into Everyone’s world, and the rest stay private on your map.
First timeCaptureRating
Reasons to keep looking
One small thing to notice each day, the same in every city, with no winners. And a private mosaic for each city: every glimpse you take or keep there becomes a tile of its picture.
Today’s observationYour mosaic, so farPreviewed finished
Explorations
Now.
From every photo taken at 9 pm, anywhere, to one page per hour, in the cities where it’s that hour right now.
Layers.
From one large photo and a layer count to the views people return to, year by year.
Capture.
From a form that still felt like posting to a camera: the photo is on your map the moment you take it.
Hour Light.
An alternative style in progress: the whole interface takes the colour of your local hour.
Next Steps
01Measure people vs. places.
A survey to put a real number on how often people revisit photos of places compared with photos of people.
02Build the real camera.
The camera runs on sample scenes for now. Next is a native camera and a real cloud library, so the space it saves is measured, not estimated.
03Test and moderate.
Usability tests with real users, and server-side image moderation before the archive opens to everyone.
