Monday, June 15, 2015

Facebook Moments will Send Pictures of Your Friends Automatically based on Facial Recognition Technology

Back in 2012, Facebook attempted to roll out automatic photo synchronization app, a feature that allowed you to store photos on Facebook, and then decide if you wanted to make them public. It was intended to help members organize the digital keepsakes, but it also meant every picture could be immediately uploaded to Facebook.

In 2014, Facebook attempted to roll out Slingshot, a Snapchat clone, however, Slingshot did not have anything major and different to offer over the competitor.

Now, it seems like Facebook has finally making better-prepared private photo-sharing attempt with Moments. The company’s new app, launched today, is a combination of the two earlier ideas - it represents a photo storage and auto-syncing meets private sharing, with some impressive facial recognition features to boot!


The app is already available on both iOS and Android today.

The new app syncs to your phone’s camera roll and then uses facial recognition and location to group photos and help you share them with the right friends. You can sync with your friends’ Moments and they can sync with yours, so you have each other’s photos.

Rather than trawling various social media platforms for photos from that pool party you attended this weekend, Moments provides a one-stop spot for all photos from a given event.

“Recognizing faces … is very, very difficult,” said Facebook artificial intelligence director Yann LeCun in a video describing the technology. What makes facial recognition so difficult from a computer intelligence perspective, he said, is that a single person can look different from photo to photo based on a variety of factors. Designing software, that can catch those nuances and find the right similarities, takes lots of data — which Facebook has. The social network already uses facial recognition technology to make suggestions for tagging people in photos. However, Moments dives much deeper in this technology.

Note that you are in power to enable or disable your own face recognition capability on your friends’ photos, if, for any reasons, you prefer to be out of the game. If you have tag suggestions enabled on your account, your friends will be able to tag and privately share photos of you with other friends using Moments. If you don’t want your own face to be targeted this way, you may want to opt out using Facebook's settings.

You can download the plugin for the supported platforms:


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