Facebook is a mess about certain things, there’s no question about that. It was sorely missing a method to easily limit the visibility of your image galleries to share with your contacts, and it is precisely to fill this hole that Facebook Moments has arrived: a mobile app that lets you automatically generate photo galleries, sync them to your Facebook account, and tag and share them with other people so they can be remotely managed and downloaded.
The way the app works is no mystery, and to a certain degree follows the premise of Facebook Messenger in terms of expanding the social network experience without being clunky, being a tool that’s completely independent of the official client. Once it’s associated with your account, the app will automatically search and catalogue all your photos by groups, taking into account the date they were taken, the people who appear in them, and their overall ‘look’. The results, at least in our tests, have been brilliant; it can even auto-detect faces and associate them with user accounts.
Initially all galleries are private, and you can choose whether to sync them to your account or keep them locally, although the real appeal of the app lies in the option to include your contacts in the gallery once it’s shared. This makes it a collaborative tool that aims to provide an alternative to similar services like the online photo viewers on cloud storage systems like Dropbox or Google Drive.
At the moment the use of the app, which is available for iOS and Android, is limited to the US, although it works perfectly with a VPN or IP subnet mask. In any case, the number of countries should be expanded soon, although the concrete date hasn’t been specified.
Aftabghumman