Facebook plans to discontinue auto-sync with download link to Moments app

Facebook plans to discontinue its auto-sync feature and suggest users to download its photo-specific Moments app instead

Facebook is going to discontinue its auto-sync feature in a month and will suggest that users download its photo-specific Moments app instead, TechCrunch reported.

Starting January 10, Facebook will replace its “Synced from Phone” photo album with a notification explaining the change and a link to download Moments.

Facebook says that as people increasingly share photos on social platforms through mobile, the photo syncing feature for its mobile app has become irrelevant.

“The feature was launched in 2012 when people took photos on their phones, but still posted primarily from computers,” Facebook said in a statement.

“People that use photo syncing will have the option to move the photos they have previously synced to our new app Moments, where they will be able to view, download, or delete them,” the statement read.

In that sense, Facebook sees Moments as a logical extension of how we snap and share pictures today: not by selectively uploading them to another destination and sharing later, but through intelligent algorithms that do the work for us entirely on our smartphones.

Moments was launched as a way to capitalise on Facebook’s face-recognition technology to automatically create photo albums of you and your friends.

The app also uses location and date information to group the photos.

Users who do not want to download Moments can download a zip file of their photos from the album before the feature is removed, Facebook said.