Facebook is going to shut down the three year old photo auto-sync feature it has on its Facebook app starting next month and will suggest users download its photo oriented Moments app instead. It comes as no surprise since Facebook made a similar decision last year by disabling Facebook chat on the Facebook app, forcing users to download the separate Messenger app (which ranks as one of the top 5 free apps on app stores). However Facebook believes that the reality of sharing photos has switched platforms; from the PC to smartphones instead, making syncing photos on our smartphones redundant.
Starting January 10th, Facebook will replace its “Synced from Phone” photo album with a notification explaining the change and a link to download Moments. Users will also see a notification at the top of their News Feeds with a “Learn More” link doing the same. Facebook says users who don’t want to download Moments can download a zip file of their photos from the album before the feature is removed.
“The feature was launched in 2012 when people took photos on their phones, but still posted primarily from computers. People that use photo syncing will have the option to move the photos they’ve previously synced to our new app Moments, where they will be able to view, download, or delete them.”
– Facebook statement
It’s for this reason that Facebook sees Moments as a logical extension of how we snap and share pictures today: not by selectively uploading them to another destination (such as our desktops) and sharing later, but through intelligent algorithms that do the work for us entirely on our smartphones.
Moments was launched in June earlier this year and works through the same face recognition technology that Facebook uses to suggests tags in pictures you upload, in an effort to automatically create albums of you and your friends. What’s more, the app also uses your location and the dte the pictures were taken to group pictures, which is great if someone else also took pictures at an event you attended.
Compared to apps like Slingshot and Rooms, Moments have seen a steady rise in popularity on iOS and Android, to the point where it’s now one of the top 20 free apps on both iOS and Android.
Source: TechCrunch
