A private place for your friend group's photos

Most friend groups have the same archive: a group chat that has been running for eight years. Every birthday, every trip, every bad haircut is in there somewhere. Nobody can find any of it.

Search for "the photo from the wedding" and you get the wedding logistics, the arguments about the gift and a voice note from someone's car. The photos are there, in theory. In practice, the chat is a river. Things go in and float away.

This post is about what a better home for those photos looks like, and how the options people actually use compare. It is written by anonity, so we have a horse in this race. We will say where others do the job better.

What "private" should mean

A lot of apps call themselves private. For a friend group's photos, it comes down to four plain questions:

1. Who can see it? Only the people you invited, or anyone with a link, or whoever the app decides to show it to?
2. Who is it for? Is it a place for the group, or a stage where you perform for a wider audience?
3. Is anyone else looking? Ads, recommendations, AI features that read what is in your pictures.
4. What happens when someone leaves or changes phones? Does the history survive?

How the usual options compare

The group chat (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)

The chat is where the group already lives, which is its biggest strength. WhatsApp and Signal encrypt messages end to end, which is a real privacy win.

As an archive, it is weak. Photos are stored on each phone, not in a shared place, so a lost phone without a backup takes years with it. On WhatsApp, someone who joins the group later cannot see anything from before they joined. And there is no structure: a photo from 2019 sits between two messages nobody remembers.

Instagram Close Friends

Close Friends limits who sees a story, and many groups use it as a semi-private channel. But stories disappear after 24 hours unless you save them to highlights, and Instagram is designed around posting for an audience. It is a stage with a velvet rope, not a shared album.

A private Facebook group

It works, and it keeps a long history. But plenty of people rarely open Facebook anymore, the group sits inside an ad-supported feed, and photos get buried in a timeline of posts the same way they do in a chat.

Shared albums (Google Photos, iCloud)

Great for one event. Google Photos shared albums and iCloud Shared Albums keep good quality and work across phones, and both are free for most people. Where they struggle is years: a friend group becomes forty albums with names like "Lisbon!!" and "new album 3", and nothing connects them.

Discord

Discord is excellent for a group that talks every day, games together or organises things. For photos, it has the same problem as a chat: everything scrolls away, and nobody opens Discord to look back at 2021.

What we built instead

anonity started from a simple frustration: our own group's memories were rotting in a chat.

The idea is a tree. Each group gets one, and it has a timeline: everything you add lands on the date it happened, so a photo from 2019 sits in 2019, not at the bottom of this week. When you bulk-add a camera roll, anonity reads the date each photo was taken and creates one moment per day. On each moment, people add their own photos, notes, voice notes and comments. Over time the tree becomes the group's shared history, in order.

On the four questions above:

1. Who can see it? Only the people who joined through your invite link or QR code. Trees are not public, not searchable and not recommended to anyone.
2. Who is it for? The group. No follower counts, and no algorithm deciding what you see.
3. Is anyone else looking? No ads, no AI features, no face recognition, no scanning what is in your photos. The only automated check reads the first bytes of each file to confirm it really is a photo or video.
4. What survives? Everything lives in the tree, not on a phone. New members see the whole history as soon as they join. You can download an archive of your trees at any time from Settings, and if anonity ever shuts down, every account gets a complete archive.

The honest part about encryption

Direct messages on anonity are always end-to-end encrypted, and a tree's group chat can be switched to end-to-end with one toggle. Photos and videos in a tree are not end-to-end encrypted. They are encrypted in transit and at rest, which is the same protection most cloud services use, and access is locked to the tree's members. We do not look at them, and we built the product so we never need to. But "we do not" is a promise, not maths, and you should know the difference.

The limits

The free plan gives you 3 trees, 1 GB of storage and as many people as you want. Photos count toward the storage of the person who planted the tree, so friends can join and add for free. Video uploads need a paid plan. Photos are resized for screens, so keep your camera originals backed up somewhere else. And there is no native iPhone app yet: it runs in Safari and can be added to the home screen, while Android has an app on Google Play.

Where to start

You do not have to move eight years at once. Plant a tree, invite two or three people who care about this stuff, and ask everyone to add the photos from one trip. Once a tree has a few real memories in it, people come back to look, and they start adding the rest on their own.

Plant your group's tree, free.