Facebook Moments lets you give, receive photos privately

Facebook has officially launched Moments, a standalone app that allows you to give your photos to friends, get their photos, and keep them all in a single private place.

Essentially the app is meant to help bring together photos from occasions, trips, and moments of your life that you’ve spent with the people who are most important to you.

“With a phone at everyone’s fingertips, the moments in our lives are captured by a new kind of photographer: our friends,” the social network says in a press release. “It’s hard to get the photos your friends have taken of you, and everyone always insists on taking that same group shot with multiple phones to ensure they get a copy”.

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The example used by Facebook is of weddings, where there are plenty of people taking great photos throughout the day. Moments is designed to provide a quick way to share your photos with the friends who are in them, and get photos that you’re in back.

According to Facebook, Moments groups the photos on your phone based on when they were taken and, using facial recognition technology, which friends are in them. You can then privately sync those photos with specific friends, and they can choose to sync their photos with you as well.

Moments, which was built by Facebook’s Creative Labs, also reportedly keeps all of your synced photos organised and lets you search them to find the ones that you or specific friends are in.

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According to Facebook, Moments also automatically creates movie compilations “of your best photos, synchronized to music, that you can quickly customize and share with friends”.

The app seems a little like the Events feature Google launched for Google+ back in 2012. That never really seemed to take off. What might set Facebook’s offering apart though is the fact that it’s launched Moments as a separate app, which will allow it to get a better idea of how many people actively use it.

Moments uses facial recognition technology to group your photos based on the friends who are in them. This is the same technology that powers tag suggestions on Facebook. You can control tag suggestions in your Settings.

The app is available for iOS and Android.

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