Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Facebook’s Photo Magic reminds you to send friends their pics

Christina Majaski
By

facebook photo magic
Facebook
Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the party or the get-together to stop and share all those photos we’ve taken and before you know it, they’re lost and forgotten in our camera rolls. If you’ve ever taken a bunch of photos while out with your friends and then forgotten to send or share them, Facebook’s newest feature, Photo Magic, aims to help.

Facebook is currently testing the feature in Australia on Android iOS, before making it available in other countries, including the U.S. “What we’ve seen is that private sending of photos in Messenger is really popular,” Peter Martinazzi, director of product management,  told TechCrunch. “About 9.5 billion photos were sent inside Messenger in the last month.”

Recommended Videos

In Facebook’s most recent report, the platform celebrated 1.4 billion users who check Facebook at least once a month via mobile, and 700 million users on Messenger. However, at the Code Conference over the summer, chief executive Evan Spiegel noted that of Snapchat’s nearly 100 million daily active users, 65 percent contribute content via images, video, and stories. Although Messenger continues to grow, Photo Magic competes with Snapchat, the app considered to be one of Facebook’s only real rivals.

Related

In the TechCrunch article, Photo Magic is described as a feature using the same facial recognition technology Facebook uses for photo tagging suggestions. Like other features, you can disable the option, but otherwise you won’t have to hunt down and remind your friends to send you the selfies you took last night because Facebook will remind them for you. The new feature will actually scan your camera roll, and if it finds photos that include your friends, it will remind you to send the photo through Messenger, with the option to attach a message. If you choose to send the photo, it will appear in a group thread to everyone in the image that it recognizes.

Of the three main types of images sent through messenger — Selfies, What’s Up (images of the world around us), and photo-sharing with friends, Photo Magic is designed to address the sharing with friends purpose which requires stopping what you’re doing in the middle of an event to send the photos. Photo Magic is intended to eliminate that distraction by reminding you to instantly send the image, and allowing you to continue to live and enjoy life uninterrupted.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Christina Majaski
Christina Majaski
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Christina has written for print and online publications since 2003. In her spare time, she wastes an exorbitant amount of…
Facebook forced to pay $550 million settlement over facial recognition lawsuit
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on "An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors" in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on October 23, 2019.

Facebook is going to have to pay quite a few people money as part of the settlement of a facial-recognition lawsuit. The catch is you have to live in Illinois.

Illinois has some of the strictest biometric privacy laws, and a 2015 lawsuit alleges that the social network violated these laws through the use of facial-recognition software in its photo tag feature without people’s consent. Illinois’ 2008 law requires companies to obtain permission before using people’s biometric data and be transparent with how the data is used and kept.

Read more
Would you trust a Facebook OS? Reports say Zuck’s building an operating system
Facebook Portal 10-inch 2019 AR chatting

As Facebook data scandals become part of the regular news cycle, the social media network wants to launch a new operating system rather than running hardware on a competitor’s. During an interview with The Information, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of hardware, said the company is working on an operating system for the next generation of technology.

“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us. We didn’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case,” Bosworth said in the interview. “And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

Read more
Now that you can easily transfer photos out of Facebook, will you stay?
mark zuckerberg speaking in front of giant digital lock

Facebook on Monday announced a new feature that will begin rolling out in Ireland before spreading elsewhere: The ability to transfer your Facebook photos directly to other platforms without having to download them first. The feature will initially only port your pics over to Google Photos, though it's likely more platforms are on the way.

This is a step forward from Facebook's already-existing data portability tool, “Download Your Information,” which allows a user to keep a copy of everything they’ve ever put on Facebook on their private computer. In a statement, Facebook told Digital Trends that “the feedback we’ve received over the years tells us that although this tool is helpful, it isn’t seamless enough for users to take information directly from one service to another.”

Read more