Introducing Piqt: The Photo and Video Curation App
Piqt is live on the App Store. Why I built a photo curator instead of another cleanup app, and what it does on day one.
Today my new iOS app, Piqt, is available on the App Store. If you want to skip the story and just use the app, you can find it on the App Store via the link below.
Piqt was born out of my desire to solve a very simple problem: navigating and managing my photos and videos. Looking for anything in my Photos library is a nightmare, and I’ve long dreamed of an easy way to not only clean out a bunch of things, but also help me surface great and memorable photos and videos. My answer is Piqt.
I’ve got kids, dogs, have been married for 17 years, and love to travel. All of these things have resulted in a massive library of photos, videos, and screenshots on my phone. Apple has made it easier to keep going without fully running out of space by stashing things on iCloud, but that’s actually compounded the issue. I’ve tried so many times to just start from the beginning and prune out things I no longer need, favorite the ones I love and add them to albums, and manage the screenshots that I took and then never looked at again… and every time the tedium of the task got old really quick.
I started building Piqt for me, but every time I mentioned what I was building to someone, the answer was the same: “Oh my God, I need that!” For me, it was just years of photos. For some, it was their screenshots. Across the board, everyone is either out of space, can’t find the thing they want, wants to share their best photos more easily, or has years of screenshots to deal with.
A Curator, not a Cleaner
There are plenty of apps out there that will help you trim space and delete photos, and my app can help there too, but I want more. I want a curator. Think about what a museum curator does: their job is way more than thinning out the art they have in the collection. They gather together pieces that work together. They give you more information and detail about the art they have. They have a keen eye for what art is truly great art. They tell a story with the pieces available to them. That’s the app I wanted to build.
We all take so many photos, and they represent experiences we want to retain, something that made us laugh that we want to revisit, an important moment we never want to forget. We should be enjoying those moments and laughing at the meme we saved, or just finding that account number we screenshotted, rather than digging around tens of thousands of photos to find it.
To tackle this, Piqt has a few key workflows out of the box:
- It surfaces the best photos and videos in your library so you can favorite / tag them
- It allows you to sort, search, and crawl your library to weed through what’s there
- It groups your non-photo photos (receipts, screenshots, etc.) into buckets based on content to make them easier to find
- It finds similar items, tells you which is best, and lets you clear out the rest in one action
- It surfaces the photos and videos that didn’t turn out so well, so you can clear them out in batches
That’s what’s launched today. To get there, I’ve focused on a few key components.
The Scanner: Intelligence so you can make informed decisions
Navigating through 12,000 (my library) or 77,000 (you know who you are) images in order is a nightmare. You’re constantly having to switch mindset. Is this the best of the bunch? Do I ever need this again? What even is this? We need help and shortcuts. Mine is the scanner.
When you first open the app, it scans through your entire library and rates your photos and videos across a number of factors. It scans for:
- Apple’s photo Score - How interesting and memorable does iOS think it is?
- A technical score - Based on a NIMA model trained on images with known distortions like blur, noise, and compression, how well did the camera do?
- An aesthetic score - Also using a NIMA model trained on 255,000 photos rated by human viewers, how beautiful is the photo?
- Face detection - Are there faces in the photo, and are they clear?
- Blurriness and exposure detection - Is the photo clear? Is it too dark or light?
- Locations - Is the photo in a unique location?
- Content and text detection - What’s actually in the picture?
- Similarity - Is this photo or video really close to another one?
These are then combined to give you a single score. You can dig into the details if you want, but we’ll tell you what your best photos are and put them all together so you can favorite them. We’ll tell you which photos didn’t come out well and put them together so you can clear them out in one place.
Everything is Private: None of Your Photos Leave the Device
Our photo libraries contain some of the most sensitive data we have on our phones. Sending any of it out to yet another cloud service is not something I was willing to do for myself or my users. That’s why I designed this to run all on device.
- All AI Models are Local: Many of the scores above are generated by AI models, but those models are all running right on your phone. This actually saves you time, keeps your photos safe, and keeps work out of the AI datacenters.
- All Sensitive Information is Scrubbed: When Piqt is scanning photos, it detects highly sensitive numbers like SSNs and account numbers and doesn’t store that text in its database on your phone.
- Piqt never makes location requests: Piqt will not use your GPS or geo-lookup services. It pulls the geographic data already in your photos and compares it to a local list for identifying places.
To go further, Piqt really only uses the network for three things:
- Some photos backed up to iCloud are not available to score locally, so we ask Photos to download them from iCloud, but we ask you first.
- We gather fully anonymous click data (what was clicked, how many times) but never who clicked it. You can opt out of this as well.
- Purchases via the App Store. Piqt is free to start, but to make your decisions permanent (favorites, delete album, etc.), you’ll need Piqt Plus.
Those are your photos and memories, and only you should have control of where they go. We don’t use your data to profile you, market to you, or train AI models on your data.
Safety is Key
Though it hasn’t happened in a while, I’ve had a few scares over the years where I migrated to a new phone and realized I’d lost photos. Once again, this is sensitive and important information for all of us. Therefore, Piqt will never directly delete your photos. It can’t.
Instead, Piqt places any photos you want to clean out in a special album within Photos. From there, you can review them, recover them, or decide to fully delete them all at once. We’re still saving you the time, because it’s as simple as select all -> Trash in that album. It keeps you in control.
Also, by limiting network access, limiting the actions it can take on your Photos, and using only vetted open source AI models, Piqt keeps your data and your phone safe.
Enjoy Your Photos Again
I created Piqt so I can enjoy my photos more, and that’s why I’m launching it on the App Store. Piqt is free to download, and you’ll have the ability to scan your library and see what it finds at no cost. If you’d like to save your changes (favorites, To Delete album, etc.), there’s a 7-day trial available. If you’d like to dive in, there are monthly and annual plans. I’m also testing out a limited “Founders Club,” which gives you full lifetime access to the app along with goodies like roadmap visibility, app badges, founder discussion forums, influence on what features I add next, and more perks to come.
Piqt is available now on the App Store. Please try it out and let me know what you love, what you don’t, and what you wish it did.