Here's How Facebook Moments Is Changing The Photo-Sharing Game

TL;DR: Facebook Moments is impressively quick, but you'll have to be OK with smaller photos.

Facebook has a new photo-sharing app called Moments (Free, iOS and Android) that is completely ~private~ by default. It's impressively fast.

Facebook

It takes advantage of two Facebook technologies, Messenger and facial recognition, to allow users to quickly send a huge group of photos to the friends in those photos.

The Moments app groups images together based on who is in them, when they were taken, and where they were taken, then "suggests" people you could share those images with.

The idea is that all pictures from the same event or vacation can be shared with multiple people or just one other person in a matter of seconds.

When you open Moments, you see a bunch of "suggestions."

The app uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to detect who is in the photo, and suggests that you "sync" the images with those people.

Press the blue "Sync" button to immediately send the images. If your friends don't have the app installed, they'll see it in Facebook Messenger.

Note: you can only sync photos with people you're already friends with.

Here's what your recipients see in Facebook Messenger. The whole process takes just a few seconds.

Once your friends download Moments, they'll be able to see all of the photos you've "synced" to their account. The app will even suggest you sync to more friends, if it detects their faces later.

Your friends can select all of the photos – or just a few – and download the images to their phones, all at once. They can also add their own photos to the set.

If your friend isn't being suggested, it's because they don't have this tag setting enabled:

If they aren't suggested, you can also manually send them photos.

This app is going to be a *game changer* for sharing wedding photos.

You can easily share photos of the couple without having to tag them and post the images publicly, which is something many couples request.

But there's one big(ish) caveat.

Facebook compresses your photos way, way down and strips the image's metadata.

I was shocked to find that the original photo was 11.56 times larger than the size of the photo after being compressed by Moments. The original photo is 7.9MP and the compressed photo is 0.69MP. That's a huge difference.

It also removed all of the photo's metadeta information, so the creation date became today versus when I took the photo (three days ago). This isn't immediately a concern but if you upload the photos to iPhoto or Picasa, the software won't be able to sort the photos by the original date they were taken. So, months from now, when you are sitting down to organize all of your photos, you'll need to remember the exact date you took them.

To give you an idea of how much the photos are compressed, here is the same photo before and after compression, viewed at actual size.

That is what a 2448 x 3264 pixel photo (left) looks like compared to a 720 x 960 pixel photo (right).

When the original photo is viewed at 100%, it's zoomed way in. When the compressed photo is viewed at 100%, that's all you get. You won't be able to tell on Instagram, but you will be able to tell if you're trying to make a print or view them on a large display.

There's also another, small caveat: your photos, even though they're private, will be stored on Facebook servers.

But if you use Instagram, Messenger, or Facebook, your photos are already on Facebook servers.

In short, photos shared via Moments are Instagram-able, but not large enough for high-resolution prints.

The app is, however, the quickest way to exchange photos. In my test, emailing the photos (upload time on my end and download time on the recipient end) took 3 minutes, while Facebook Moments took just 30 seconds.