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

Facebook is shutting down its Moments photo app because nobody knew it existed

Hillary K. Grigonis
By

Facebook Moments is shutting down. Did you not realize there was such a thing as Facebook Moments? Don’t worry, that’s why the app is shutting down. Moments, an app that uses Facebook’s facial recognition to share images with friends, will be shutting down on February 25. The social media company began notifying users via email on Thursday, January 24 and updated the app for easier exporting.

Facebook says that the Moments app is shutting down partially because few users were actually using it. Launched in 2015, Moments uses Facebook’s facial recognition technology to sort through your camera roll. If you have any photos of your Facebook friends, the app sends a notification suggesting you share those images with the people in the photos. 

Recommended Videos

The app also served as a way to save photos to keep them from hogging space on your device. That means users still using the Moments app will need to download images to avoid losing photos. Moments users can go to Facebook’s dedicated website to export images that they want saved to their computer hard drive or device camera roll. Another option is to use the Moments app to share those images to Facebook — an album that can be set to “only me” to avoid sharing the backlog of photos on the news feed. The website to download old Moments photos will be available until May.

Related

While similar apps like Google Photos designed to store and save images privately have been a success, Moments will go down in history as one of Facebook’s off-shoot apps that never took off. Once users shared a photo with friends, the app would notify the others in the photo but prompt them to download the Moments app to see the image. At the launch, Facebook called it “a much more private kind of sharing with specific friends.”

Facebook’s side apps sometimes wind up being features inside the main app. For publicly shared photos, Facebook automatically tags friends in the photos. With recent bugs like the one that saved unshared videos to users downloadable Facebook data, it’s easy to see why users may not trust the platform with storing private photos.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary K. Grigonis
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Instagram is shutting down its Threads messaging app
Instagram welcome screen on iPhone.

It looks like Instagram’s stand-alone messaging app, called Threads, will soon be shutting down as part of an ongoing consolidation of messaging apps by Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook that owns Instagram).

Threads arrived in 2019 as a stand-alone alternative to direct messaging in the Instagram app. Basically, Threads was to Instagram what Facebook Messenger is to Facebook.

Read more
Three reasons Facebook/Meta is shutting down its face recognition system
facebook privacy mark zuckerberg

Meta, Facebook's new parent company, announced on Tuesday that Facebook would be eliminating its face-recognition system in the coming weeks. More than a third of Facebook's regular users take advantage of face-recognition features, so this change will impact a number of people.

If users are currently "opted in" to the face-recognition setting, the templates used to identify each user will be deleted. There will be no more automatic facial recognition in photos or videos, either. Another area this will impact is Automatic Alt Text, or AAT, which is used to describe images to visually impaired or blind individuals. Once the face-recognition system is gone, so is the ability to specifically identify each person in a photo using facial recognition.

Read more
You can soon react to WhatsApp messages with emojis, but it’s broken right now
whatsapp emoji reactions update broken alt

Amid the backdrop of Facebook renaming itself Meta, WhatsApp added a new way for users to get away with not indulging in small talk. As part of the company's vision to unify the experience in all its apps, Facebook-owned WhatsApp might now allow users to respond to messages with emojis, just like on Instagram and Facebook Messenger. The only barrier, however, is that the feature is not fully functional yet.

After being spotted in August by WABetaInfo, emoji reactions are now rolling out to certain WhatsApp users. The feature is now available starting with WhatsApp's 2.21.22.17 beta update and is apparently limited to the app's Android version at the moment.

Read more