Facebook Moments -- A Much Smarter Photo App Than Before

An improved version from the 2012 automatic photo sync if users wish to make photos public.

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has improved its version of Facebook Moments by making its photo app much smarter than before. It was first launched in 2012, a feature that allowed you to store photos with the option to make it public, in a bid to protect the privacy for those which are “private”.

However, Facebook then discovered that there were some concerns regarding that just about every uploaded photo was kept in Facebook. Then in 2014, the company attempted to make a Snapchat clone. It may not have been a bad app but it did not have anything to offer to emulate its services.

Now the social media company seemed to have set things right by merging the photo storage ability to that of auto synchronizing to meet private needs, and that too with impressive facial recognition features.

Will Rubin, Product Manager, announced the feature launch today by stating that the app is complementary to talking with your friends and posting photos at the same time. The Moments app will work in a way in when once the photos are uploaded, it is first arranged into groups, based on where they were taken, say in a wedding or at a holiday. The facial recognition that is installed will identify which friends are there in the photo, so that the photos are privately sent to those specific friends, instead of making it available to the public in general.

The sync app has some drawbacks though. The photo that is uploaded is in very private, guarded places. When it comes to Moments, there are two options provided, “Private” or “Synched”. Initially, when the photos are uploaded, they are first placed in “Private”. Then an option is provided whether to share the photos with that person with who included in the photo.

The facial recognition testing showed no problems in terms of mismatched faces, which shows that Facebook does store previous tagged photos of the person to confirm that the facial recognition is the same, which just a very slight variation – a sign of how it is taking its facial recognition technology feature seriously. If the user turns off that feature, then it would not be amongst those friends suggested while using synchronized.

Moreover, The social network giant had said that if anyone was, say, going on a camping trip with a friend, and that friend had Moments app installed and had snapped several photos, then she would get a notification. The app will recognize the several photos taken at a particular moment.

Facebook’s stock price ended the previous day at $80.71, a massive drop of more than 1%.