Shine: Photo Messaging

Share smartly with streams, AI curation, and privacy-forward tools.

Shine is an AI-powered private social network designed to make connecting easier and relationships stronger—all through the power of photos. Photo sharing becomes more powerful with AI and can bring people closer.

Shine’s features include:

INTRODUCING STREAMS, your WhatsApp for Photos.

We all share photos via messaging. The issue is that messaging was made for chatting, not photo sharing – so the photo experience is usually less than ideal – not full resolution, too many near duplicates, no easy gallery view. To optimize for photo-based chats, Shine now has streams, which are essentially group chats consisting entirely of photos. A stream could be for your family, a group trip, a classroom, a team, a night out, a dinner party and so on. They are like albums, but they can be infinite. They may span a few hours or span years. Streams also harness AI to organize and de-duplicate photos (finding the best one). They work great for events, parties and trips, but now the power of Shine’s curation, suggestions, and ease of sharing spans many other kinds of sharing too.

AI POWERED. Shine uses AI to make photo sharing easier and better.

■ FACIAL RECOGNITION. We’ve surveyed all the face recognition models so you can get the benefit of the best of what is available today. In a stream, Shine can find all the photos of a person easily. Shine can even suggest who might be in the photos using the profile pictures from your contacts. And, you can tag people and share with them in one smooth action. For those of you who love tagging, Shine even keeps count of how many faces you’ve tagged in total and displays it on your profile page.

■ AI CURATION. Shine’s AI curation is as powerful as ever, but now it’s even more useful. By using the power of AI, you don’t have to spend your time picking the “best” photo and remembering who to send it to. You can simply drop your photos into a stream and let Shine group near-duplicates, select a key photo, and suggest, based on facial recognition, who else you may want to share with or add to the stream. This works particularly well with “everyday” photos that may not be bound for Instagram glory, but are still something you want to share with your family or friends. This is where AI-powered private social networking comes in. It’s private because it’s just your family and friends.