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Facebook Is Killing Photograph Syncing, Asks Users To Download Its "Moments" App Instead

Facebook clearly believes it has its next hitting app on its easily to follow Messenger with its private photo-sharing service, Moments. The company has now announced it will before long discontinue support for photo syncing, and is instead asking users to download the Moments app through a pop-up notification that appears at the elevation of the News Feed. That means if yous want to continue to access photos yous've privately synced from your phone, you'll no longer be able to find these in a separate anthology on Facebook – you lot'll need to download a new awarding.

The company had already been pushing Facebook Moments more heavily than many of its other standalone applications, through a combination of News Feed promotions and Messenger integration. That signaled Facebook felt the app had mainstream potential – previously, the company watched dozens of apps and features die off, preferring natural option to clear out those that can't succeed on their own.

In fact, Facebook even recently shut down its internal R&D group, Facebook Labs, which birthed a number of experimental apps that never took off, including Riff, Slingshot, and Rooms.

Moments, however, was another story.

The app, which allows users to privately share photos with select friends, has been climbing the app store charts over the past few months as Facebook lent its forcefulness to give the app more visibility across its social network and on its instant messaging service. When a user shares photos with friends on Moments, the app pushes a bulletin that tells the friend they take photos waiting to the recipient's Notifications feed on Facebook and to their Messenger app. This has encouraged viral adoption among Facebook's user base.

Now Facebook is transitioning those users who relied on the photo-syncing characteristic to Moments.

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Photograph-syncing, in instance yous're unfamiliar, was launched several years ago to offer mobile users an easier way to dorsum upwards and upload their photos to Facebook's service. The app would run in the groundwork, syncing photos to a private album on Facebook where they could afterward be edited, shared, or deleted, every bit users saw fit. The feature was a big bargain at the time as photos take been one of the core drivers for return visits and time on the site. To shut it downward entirely in favor of Moments is nearly as assuming a move as when Facebook ripped out Messenger functionality inside its flagship app final year, forcing users to download the standalone version of Messenger in order to conversation with friends on mobile.

As a issue, Messenger became the pinnacle free app on the App Store. (Though it sometimes slips to #2).

Moments is next to get this type of handling. If y'all value having your photos backed up and automatically synced, y'all'll accept to now download another app, says Facebook.

The company tells us that those people who move to Moments will have the photos they've previously synced to Facebook available in the app, and those who don't desire to install Moments will be given the take chances to download a zip file of their photos on their estimator, or tin delete their photos through their Facebook profiles.

The move as well comes at a time when rival Google is seeing success with its ain standalone photo-syncing app, Google Photos, at present a top twenty "Photos & Video" app on iOS, and a meridian x app on Android.

As of January tenth, photo syncing on Facebook will finish, the pop-up notification on the top of Facebook's News Feed explains. A link to "Learn More" advises that "you'll still be able to admission your synced photos in Moments, a new app created by Facebook."

"The Moments app lets you organize and privately share photos from your phone, and download or delete photos yous've synced to Facebook," reads the site.

A similar notification also appears when yous browse to the "Synced from Telephone" album on Facebook. Both notifications include a link to download Moments – Facebook actually texts you a link that volition direct you to the advisable app store, either the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

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Since Facebook began showing this message to its billion-plus user base, the Moments app has seen some other big jump in the app store rankings. While it was ranked in the top 100 gratis apps earlier this month – a decent showing – the added promotion pushed the app upwards to position #three on Friday, December 11th on the iTunes App Store. Information technology has fallen a scrap in the days since, but is still in the superlative 15 as of yesterday. On Google Play, it's a top 10 application likewise.

In that location is, however, 1 outcome with the transition to Moments – it's unclear how this will affect Facebook'southward European user base.

Considering Moments takes advantage of facial recognition to suggest who to share your photos with, Moments was not fabricated available in Europe due to the region'south privacy protection regulations. Nosotros suspected that Facebook would take to release a version of the app in Europe that doesn't include the facial recognition functionality, as that'south how information technology has handled similar matters in the past. However, we empathize that the plan for the time being is to but phase out photo syncing on Facebook in the countries where Moments is available.