Facebook releases Moments photo app that recognizes your friends from your camera roll

Facebook has released an app called Moments that will help you sort through the hundreds of photos on your camera roll and share them with the right people. Remember when your friend asked you for that photo you took last month, and you had to scroll through a whole lot of photos you didn’t even knew you took just to find it?

Moments aims to help you by using face-recognition technology to scan your camera roll for familiar faces and quickly sync them to the subject of the photo. It is powered by the same technology that Facebook uses to suggest tags when you upload a photo of a friend to the social network.

If your friend uses Moments as well, the photo you took with them in it will be automatically added to their synced collection. They will also have the option to save it to their camera roll. If not, they’ll instead get a notification on Facebook Messenger that tells them that they have photos in Moments.

In addition to identifying your friends, Moments groups your photos based on when they were taken and who is in them, giving you a very visual representation of your event timeline.

Of course, taken alone, what Moments offers is nothing particularly revolutionary. Google Photos and Flickr already offer similar tagging and photo organization capabilities. But Moments does have two key things going for it – Facebook’s database and its Messenger app that tells non-users to download Moments if their friend shares something with them.

Facebook already knows who your friends are, so Moments won’t have to start from scratch and you can immediately begin sorting through your photos right off the bat. And combined with its promotion through Messenger, Moments has huge potential to go viral.

If you’re wondering why Facebook hasn’t integrated this into its main app, that’s because Facebook wants to make Moments a private space for photo sharing among friends. I’m sure we’d all agree that it’s much better to keep the dredging up of old photos within a small circle of intimate friends.

However, if you’re a privacy freak and would prefer not to allow your face to be identified on your friends’ photo rolls, you can opt out in Facebook’s settings.

Moments is already available for download on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

Source: Facebook via The Verge

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