Popsa launches Memories
Register to get 3 free articles
Support the Dead Pixels Society and get access to exclusive content by becoming a subscriber!
Want unlimited access? View Plans
Already have an account? Sign in
U.K. personalized product company Popsa launched an AI curation feature on its iOS and Android app called Memories to rediscover forgotten photos
Memories launches in two collections: Popsa Rewinds, which curates highlights from the past month or year into one story, and Popsa Journeys, which instantly resurfaces forgotten holidays and day trips.
The Memory Economy report, Popsa’s survey of 8,000 global consumers conducted earlier this year, found that:
- 70% of smartphone photos are never revisited
- Only 16% have looked back at even a quarter of their own camera roll in the past year
- 49% say their camera roll actively stresses them out
“The camera roll has become an archive system rather than a reminiscing experience, and our research shows that sorting them is a common issue for users” says Liam Houghton, CEO and Founder of Popsa. “In fact, I started Popsa after realising I had over 250,000 photos on my own phone. I was documenting my life, but I had no way to actually make sense of any of it.”
Memories is an AI that runs privately on the customer’s device, automatically resurfacing and curating the best moments buried in a camera roll. AI photo curation isn’t new – Apple and Google have both offered versions of it for years. What’s new is where Popsa does it, and how it organizes the results.
Built on PrivateContext, Popsa’s on-device intelligence layer developed over a decade of machine learning work, Popsa Memories automatically detects the people, places and activities most present in someone’s life. It recognizes when something worth remembering happened while letting users hide any memories that they don’t want to see. Entirely on device, nothing is ever uploaded and no one at Popsa ever sees the photos – photos only leave a device when a customer chooses to print them.
“We decided early on that understanding someone’s photos should never require uploading them,” says Houghton. “PrivateContext does all of that work on the device, so some of the most personal data people own stays in their hands.”
