There was a time when candid moments were captured by a camera lens and the photographs were pasted in an album. A flip through the pages of the album would take us to the sweet memories associated with the photographs. Social networking sites replaced photo albums a long time ago. Facebook made people’s lives more social by allowing them to upload photos.
Facebook launched a new feature called Moments back in 2015 as a new way to manage pictures of you and your friends by uploading them all to the app. The company’s facial recognition software easily identifies them and lets you share them with your friends.
Though Moments was an attempt by the social networking site to hook more users, its charm slowly faded and not many people were interested or awed by the feature. This could be the reason why the company has announced that it’ll be pulling the plug on Moments on February 25.
The feature worked by Facebook employing the user data for things like figuring out who one’s friends are or when their birthdays are, but Moments photos were presented in a bubble. There was not much development in the feature, which could be another reason why people started finding it easier to just share the photos to Facebook or use another
service like Google Photos that was actively being upgraded. Though Facebook claims that it is winding up the feature only because not many people are using it, the fact cannot be denied that the company had no interest in upgrading the feature, which was the best method to gather user data, the main priority of the company.
Before shutting down the feature, Facebook has created a tool to help users rescue their photos from Moments, either by creating a private album of the pictures on their main Facebook account or downloading them back to a device (reverse of what Moments was originally supposed to do). Users will have until May to download or transfer their pictures before they're gone for good.
