To be very honest, the photos apps on both iphone and android really suck. They have hardly changed in years and were not meant for a world in which people have thousands of click thousands of photos. We need a 10x improvement – the kind that Notion did to notetaking, that the browser company is doing to the browser.

Specifically, here are some things I would like to see.

• Image search! Help me find the photos for my friend’s birthday without making me scroll through all my photos for minutes. I should just type in a search query and it should figure the rest out. To do this, the app could generate an description for each photo and store that in the photo’s metadata.
• Good sorting photos. When I click photos of people as memories, store it in a folder called “memories”; when I click documents, store it in “documents”. When i download videos from online, store them in such a folder.
• Auto rotate, auto crop etc. 
• From a bunch of similar photos (clicked in a burst), find the best one and delete the rest.
• Make it super easy to share the photos with friends (apple has a shared album, but it is really underdeveloped).
• Make it easy to delete photos in bulk. One idea I saw somewhere online earlier was a mode wherein you can just swipe left to delete, right to keep. No multi-step process to delete each photo; no trying to see what the photo was from the small icons.
• Make it easy to cloud backup my photos wherever I wanna store everything else (Google Drive, icloud, onedrive, box…). I shouldn’t need to buy storage everywhere unnecessarily.
• A more powerful video editing tool in the app itself.

If one really thinks about it, one can probably come up with a dozen other ways in which the photos apps could be improved.

How might the business model work? I’m not entirely sure yet, but this could work as a one-time paid app, or with a premium version. An interesting way might be to use some proprietory tech to identify images from the user’s album that they might be comfortable submitting to stock image websites; then with user’s permission the app could submit that (in one click). Given that each user will have at least 50 such photos, that would be a huge number of stock photos (pretty valuable I suppose.

You could also eventually sell out to one of the OS providers (like Apple or Google) and they could incorporate your tech by default.