Facebook recently announced that it will be killing off its photo syncing feature on the 10th of January, 2016. The social networking behemoth says that users who wish to continue enjoying the features of the photo sync service can download its Moments app.
Photo syncing, for those of you who do not know, was a feature Facebook had released a long ago that operated in the background and automatically backed-up users’ local photos to Facebook and stored these images in a private album. Users could later edit, share or delete these files, as they deemed fit.
The feature was appreciated a lot and users found it to be very useful. But sadly, the integrated version of the feature will soon be shut down.
Earlier, we saw Facebook tear down its Messenger feature from its mobile app and launch it as a separated app. It was a very bold move, but Facebook got very positive results. Following this, Messenger became the top free app on the App Store.
We can’t say that Facebook isn’t attempting to do the same with Moments right now, to be honest.
If you’re using Facebook on your smartphone app (or even anyhow else), you might already be familiar with the pop-up notification at the top of your News Feed that is asking you to download Moments.
The app has already been on the PlayStore and AppStore for a while now and has been steadily rising in popularity ever since its launch. Moments allows users to privately share photos with select friends. Facebook has been keen on marketing this app in every way they could. The company advertised the app across its social network and on its instant messaging service, heavily as of late.
The app allows users to share photos privately with other and sends them a message via a Notifications feed on Facebook and to their Messenger app that tells them they have photos waiting.
People who are currently using Photo Sync do not need to worry. If they move to Moments, they will have the photos they’ve previously synced to Facebook available in the app, automatically. If they choose not to switch to Moments, they can either download a zip file of their photos on their computer or can delete their photos through their Facebook profiles.
As stated earlier, Moments has been seeing a great amount of popularity increase. Until last month, it was ranked in the top 100 free apps in both iOS and Android Stores, and now recently, it climbed up to the top 15 and top 10 apps on each Store respectively.
The notification warning us of the inevitable doom of photo sync is as below:
While all that’s fine, it is still unclear how Facebook will market the app in European countries where apps using facial recognition are illegal (Moments uses facial recognition). Our best guess is that the social giant will release a variant of the app without the feature there.
