← Product designP—03

Glimpse

A living map of the world you define.

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.

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	Privacy-first	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.

YesPartlyNo

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.
02Meaning over storage.
Give unposted photos meaning by mapping them as memories, pinned to the real places they were taken, instead of letting them pile up in the camera roll.
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.

Everything in Glimpse starts from the map, and each part answers one of the goals above: meaning over storage, place over person, time as a dimension.

01

Your photos, back where you took them

Every photo you take or keep goes onto the street where it was taken, instead of piling up in the camera roll. Your world stacks them street by street, the year bar switches between years, and zooming out shows every city you’ve photographed.

02

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.

The first time the camera opens: your camera, now a map. Same camera, kept off your iPhone, found by place, looks — First time

Looks: Natural, Chrome, Slide, Negative, Warm and True Color, with Chrome picked — Capture

Right after a shot: the photo is rated 94, in focus, well lit, a real photo and new to your map, so it goes public to the archive; placed on Rua das Escolas Gerais, 4 MB kept off your iPhone — Rating

03

Everyone’s world, without the people

The photos people choose to share build Everyone’s world: a public map of places, with no names, no likes and no followers. Every glimpse is about where and when it was taken, never about who took it.

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.

Welcome card 1: map your world with the photos you never post — What this is

Welcome card 2: places, not people; no names, likes or followers — How it’s different

Welcome card 3: every street, layered in time — Why 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.

A glimpse of Alfama, Lisbon: catalogue number 38,214, the tram photo and its caption

The glimpse details: date, local time, golden hour light, season, rounded location, camera, then Keep, I’ve been here, Share and Map, and more layers of the place

04

One place, through time

The same place keeps changing, so Glimpse lets you move through it in time, by the year and by the hour.

Layers, year by year

Layers groups everyone’s glimpses of a place into the views people return to, then steps through each view year by year.

Layers: the view over the rooftops of Alfama at dawn in 2023 — 2023

Layers: the same view on a morning in 2026 — 2026

Now, hour by hour

One hour per page: swipe to move through the day and around the world, each hour in its own light. On the Yours side, the same hour shows every photo you took at that time of day, wherever you were and in any year.

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.