Facebook Moments
Lots of news and reports about Facebook removing the Sync photos album and “forcing” people to use the new Facebook Moments app. Sync was introduced in 2012 as a place to store photos if you didn’t want to share them immediately. Facebook have been promoting Moments since December and have been letting members know if they had any images in the sync file to download them. The date to transfer by is 7 July.
Congratulations to all the publications who immediately created fear and misinformation around this.
Let us say to you now DONT PANIC.
You may not have any photos in the Sync file. These are only photos which were AUTO SYNCED, not those you upload yourself.
If you do, you can choose to use the moments app and save them there, or you can simply go to the photos in the sync album and download them individually.
If you have an album called “Synced” or “Synced from Phone” then it affects you. Facebook will have been giving you messages about this for some time.

The lovely Mari Smith posted some great tips on her facebook page as we were putting this together. You can find her full post here. Mari provided the following information and link for help to download your files. She writes “if you don’t want to use the Moments app, but want to save your synced photos, you can download the photos now on desktop. See this help section: “How do I download or delete my synced photos on Facebook?”
To be honest we had more issues when Dropbox removed the Carousel app – we lost some images in a hidden file because we were were just to slow to move!
What is Moments anyway?
Facebook Moments is an app that lets you share specific photos with friends. It’s quite a handy tool if you are at an event togther and want to easily share images with a friend or colleague. It also allows you to sort images via that friend or colleague, by the facial recognition technology. This is disruptive technology that helps us get organised. You can create an album of images and Facebook will also recommend based on recent images. For example I went to a friend’s show recently and Moments popped all the photos I took – I could review them and take some out then I can choose who to send them too.
You can also ask friends to send photos of you, which can be great if you are at an event and not able to take pictures. Just ask them to send them afterwards.
One thing though.. be careful not to send to the wrong person – I couldn’t see a cancel button!
[By the way if you are in Europe you probably won’t see the app as there are issues around the use of facial recognition there}. On one hand we see that – could be seen as invasion of privacy, but on another it has proven to be a valuable tool in solving crimes .
So that’s our take on it. No need to panic. Learn more about Moments here.
We would love your comments.