When we were making Yandex Disk, we knew people accumulate gigabytes of photos and do nothing with them. There was an intuition that someth…

When we were making Yandex Disk, we knew people accumulate gigabytes of photos and do nothing with them. There was an intuition that something could be invented in this direction. Based on the mass of data that servers digest, give people some pleasant emotions. But at that moment we were much more occupied by the idea of a single virtual space. Some universal and intuitive system of "Everything of mine is in Yandex," instead of file storage. Which nobody understands. The wind of innovation carried me off to do even bolder things. More on that some other time. I will stick to the format: screenshot and why it is cool. Everyone had ideas about somehow utilizing gigabytes of user photos, and they continue to appear. Google invented showing people "your photos on this day in past years." By the way, the interface and interaction with this part of Google Photos is unbelievably mangled. And nobody has fixed it for a long time. Apparently the "launch-bonus-oblivion" system is still working there. Apple then developed the idea, made the For You section, and started throwing in photos from vivid events "around this time in past years." The highest-quality and most magical application for the graveyard of user photos arrived a year ago, together with iOS 16. At first, the loud words were received with skepticism. "From a Design Team perspective, our goal was to create something that felt almost more editorial..." The first hundreds of my photos on the lock screen were far from editorial. But time passes, the neural network learns. And today we are admiring a breakwater going into the Mediterranean Sea in a place called Six-Fours-les-Plages. Off camera, a man comes every evening in a VW camper, pours port wine, and greets the sunset. And the interview about developing the lock screen in iOS 16 is good, inspiring. Read it.