Facebook Moments App Auto-Curates Event Albums

Facebook has launched a new photo management app, Moments, intended to privately gather up shared shots from events. Figuring that plenty of people take lots of photos at parties, family gatherings, and other social occasions, but never share them with other participants or, indeed, see the pictures their friends took on their phones, the iPhone and Android app uses a combination of facial recognition and timestamps to figure out what combined gallery needs to be created.

On your phone, Moments looks at when each photo was taken and then uses the same face-recognition that powers auto-tagging on Facebook on the web. That gives it an idea of when you were at an event and who you were with at the time; that's compared with the photos taken by others believed to be at the same event.

If given permission, a private combined gallery is then created, so that everybody has a copy of all the photos, no matter which they themselves took.

Facebook's example use is a wedding: lots of attendees snapping photos of happy couple, not to mention the inevitable mass-mayhem when people find the open bar, but no easy way to collate all of the photographic evidence later. Moments would sift through the images and automatically bring them together.

Meanwhile, there are organizational and search tools, as Facebook does its level best to convince you that Mark Zuckerberg's servers – rather than those of Google Photos, perhaps – are the best place to organize your entire image history.

Facebook Moments is launching today in the US, with a broader roll-out promised over time. If you're worried about who might be able to tag you in the app, you can control the settings in the "Tag suggestions" section of Facebook in your browser.

SOURCE App Store; Google Play