Why we built Kins
It started with a simple question.
What if there were a place like Instagram, except more than one person could post to it? That’s the whole idea behind Kins.
The best days always end up split across everyone’s phones. You shoot your friends, they shoot you, and someone gets the two of you from across the room. Your camera roll holds maybe half the day. The other half lives on someone else’s phone.
So Kins is built around albums, not accounts. An album carries the context: the trip you took together, the club that meets every Saturday, a kid’s first year. The people in it aren’t anyone’s followers. They’re the people who were there. Nobody has to post only the good ones. The blurry shots and the goofy ones belong here too.
We call this a social album. It’s not a familiar term yet, so here’s what we mean: everyone who was there adds what they shot, and the album fills in from every side. Photos pulled out of that context sink fast, buried in group chats and lost among thousands of others. Kept together in one album, they hold onto the rest: who you were with, what kind of day it was. Photos come and go. Albums last.
We built the camera too. You shoot first and spin through film looks after, and the shot can go straight into the album. The camcorder records like an old tape, and the photo-strip frames turn a whole day into one strip. Nothing sits in your camera roll waiting to be edited. We wanted every photo to feel worth keeping the second you take it.
Our rules are simple. Adding photos should never feel like a chore. An album should be worth opening again years from now. And an album doesn’t need an end date, because some relationships just keep going.
We’re a small team with plenty left to fix. If something bugs you, tell us. We read every message.
— The Kins team