MorningPics Sends You An Instagram From The Past Every Morning

A month and about 10,000 emails into its beta, MorningPics, the latest project by ArtistData founder Brenden Mulligan has opened to the public. Previously invite only, the service is now available to anyone who has more than 20 photos on Instagram and wants to try it out.

The concept is simple enough: Users who sign up for MorningPics will receive a different Instagram picture that they’ve taken in the past via email every morning, with the all the social accoutrements like comments and likes included. One beta tester likened it a “short, sharp shock of nostaligia every morning.”

“The goal of MorningPics is to help people revisit and refresh a past moment that they might otherwise have forgotten,” says Mulligan. “The idea came when I was sharing a photo of Machu Picchu, realizing I would probably never see it again because it would disappear off my photo feed. I started wondering how many little moments I’d captured, but then forgotten. When I got home, I wrote a small app that would show me a random photo each day.”

Mulligan tells me that 70% of the beta test users open their MorningPics email every single day, and less than 5% have unsubscribed, impressive engagement levels for a mass email. And his isn’t the first or the last Instagram-related project Mulligan is working on, having created the beloved Photopile and also focusing his energies on another product in development.

According to the MorningPics press release, no plans for Color integration are in the works.