Facebook is now urging its users to install their Moments app. This is a standalone app that syncs photos from your smartphone’s photo album. Facebook already has another standalone app for messaging.
Reports say that the social networking platform has said that it will delete thousands of photos stored online if users don`t install the Moments app. But the reports also say that that photos uploaded on Facebook are completely safe.
In 2012, the Facebook app for phones had a feature that would enable automatically syncing the phone’s local album to private one online. The photos could be synced purely for storage, yet easily accessible for whenever the owner decided to share them on Facebook. In June 2015, that feature was disabled in the core app, in favour of adding it to a new app, Moments. It used the same face-recognition software in Facebook’s photo tagging feature, to organise your local photos based on which of your friends is in them. Then, with the tap of a button, everyone in the group could share photos with the others, certainly a lot easier than manually transferring photos to each contact over WhatsApp for instance.
When Facebook disabled the auto sync feature, it made it known that users who didn’t want to shift to Moments, could download their previously synced photos in a zip file. The reason for that is now clear, as Facebook has said it will delete all those privately synced photos if users don’t switch to Moments.