June 15, 2015

Facebook Releases a Separate App for Private Photo Sharing

Facebook has developed another better way to share photos privately.

Moments as its called is released  today, Monday for iOS and Android, is a standalone app that will organize the photos on people’s smartphones, and let users share them privately with a select set of friends. The app groups photos together based on when they were taken, and, who’s in them. It uses the same facial recognition technology that powers the suggested tagging feature on Facebook’s site.

Moments lets users sync photos with the people who are at a specific event, like a party or wedding.

The app attempts to solve a 21st century problem: People don’t always want to post every photo of their friends on Facebook, but friends still want to see the photos taken of them on other people’s phones.

The app removes the need to dig through one’s smartphone to find each photo of, say, John and Mary taken at the wedding, and then text or email them each photo. Moments will group those photos together, and let the user share them all at once with John and Mary. The app does not post the photos on Facebook unless users want to.

For the tagging to work, the people depicted in the photos must have Facebook accounts, with tagging enabled. To view the synced photos, the people depicted must download the Moments app. Otherwise they will see a preview in Facebook’s Messenger app.

It arrives as some of the company’s rivals, like Google and Yahoo, develop increasingly sophisticated photo sharing and storage services incorporating their own image recognition technology.

Google recently released Google Photos, which will automatically recognize specific people, places and objects inside photos, and let users search for items depicted in the photos.

Facebook users can control image tagging in their settings.

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