Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s recently announced photo-sharing app Shine has some online wondering, “What year is this from?”
Mayer, who served as Yahoo’s chairman and CEO from 2012 to 2017, launched Lumi Labs with former colleague Enrique Munoz Torres in 2018. In 2020, the company changed to Sunshine and released its first product, Sunshine Contacts, on iOS and Android an app that promises to help users organize their contacts using algorithms, user data, and public data sources.
Shine’s debut was met with polarized opinions, with some celebrating the app’s promised simple and intuitive group photo sharing and others, like Business InsiderKatie Notopoulos, who claims that the Shine’s “design and concept feel like they’re from 2009.”
The app is focused on sharing photos directly with your friends and family. “With Shine, a photo belongs to a time and a place, and to the people who were there,” explains the app’s store listing.
Users create curated albums for past, present and even future events, giving people a quick way to upload and share photos. Invited group members can see included images and even add their own.
The app, like Sunshine Contacts, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the overall user experience. In Shine’s case, users can either manually control the photos in their shared album, singling them out as they see fit, or rely on AI to automatically select the “best” photos.
“Shine uses AI to figure out which images are worth sharing for an album. This means looking at where and when they were taken, who is in them, and grouping photos of the same scene or moment. It also avoids photos you probably don’t want to share with the group (screenshots, personal selfies). In Magic Mode, shareable photos are automatically uploaded to the album, and for photos that Shine isn’t sure about, it prompts you,” explains the developer.
With the user’s permission, the app can also analyze a person’s photos to look for patterns and help identify groups that might be appropriate for sharing certain images. This also applies to other members of the group. After they accept the invitation to join, they can allow the app to browse their photos, looking for suitable ones to add.
Shine can be helpful for users who regularly take photos of events and forget to share them. Just because people are taking more photos than ever and they’re generally easy to share, doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to improve the photo sharing process.
However, some applications have already solved these problems. For example, the group photo sharing app Cluster was launched more than ten years ago.
Despite the user interface and design of the app that many call outdated, Shine hopes to differentiate itself by implementing artificial intelligence and using full-resolution photos. While individual users can see compressed images in their app, as a user review on the Apple App Store points out, the service saves the original photos. Even if the preview looks low-quality, users will get a high-quality image when they download it from the app.
“Could you please hire a designer?” asks Bryce Schmidtchen on Xu, formerly known as Twitter. “This app serves a great purpose, but its visual design is shockingly poor and outdated.”
Mayer quickly replied: “Thank you and yes! Please send clues our way.” So while some users are pandering to Shine’s overall look and user experience, it seems the company is open to hiring the people it needs to improve the service. Looking at an older house that needs a little touch-up, a potential home buyer might say, “It’s got good bones.”
Shine is available as a free download on iOS. By the way, “free” means free because Shine doesn’t include in-app purchases. Shine also works on desktop through its website. The web version includes generative AI that people can use to create images for their event invitations.
Image authors: Sun