After occasionally teasing us with a photo or two in our News Feed, Facebook has finally released Moments for iOS and Android – a smart photo sharing app that is looking to re-examine how we, as smartphone users, share snaps with our friends.
Most of you must have been through a situation like this where you and your friends have taken a load of photos at a party or an event, followed up with sharing via cloud, email, IM clients, etc. It’s one daunting task where it’s difficult to get all the photos others have taken of you, and get them organized in one single place. Moments by Facebook is attempting to address this very problem, and is making sure that you and your friends are able to share photos of each other without much work, thanks to the intelligence baked into the app.
Using facial recognition, Moments will analyze the photos in your camera roll and compare them with your friends’ photos on Facebook. The app will further explore where the photos were taken and when, subsequently highlighting locally saved snaps that can be shared with your Facebook friend provided he / she has the Moments app installed as well. This will create a shared album (moment) where photos can be collected, with changes made to the album synced across all invited friends. If the app happens to recognize more than one face in a photo, you will be immediately prompted to share the photo to a group.
All photos synced to Moments can also be saved locally to your phone or tablet, but the idea that you and your friends can share each other’s snaps almost instantaneously without having to dig into heaps of albums speaks volume about the direction of photo sharing – especially management – should be making. If discretion is a concern for you, all created moments are private, and only accessible to invited friends who can of course share more photos in the process.
As it stands right now, Moments is definitely a swift and no-nonsense tool for sharing those blast-from-the-past photos, giving you a chance to rediscover some of those embarrassing moments gone by in the past. However, it still has a long way to go from here given the presence of some heavyweight photo sharing apps, though Facebook’s attempt will make some users question if all that weight actually matters to them.
Moments is available for iOS and Android in the United States right now, but will soon be rolling out to other regions as well.
(Download: Moments for iPhone / Android)
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