Facebook Moments lets you share photos privately

Facebook has introduced yet another new app that aims to make it easier to share photos with friends, without plastering them publicly over the social network. Dubbed Facebook Moments, the smartphone app allows you to upload snaps to a private album that is only visible to specific friends.

The app is designed to counter two perceived annoyances of the modern age. The first is having to beg friends to send you photos taken at a party, on holiday or other event that you both attended. The second is having to pass everyone’s smartphone to a passer by, so that everyone has the same group photo stored on their phone.

The Moments app uses facial recognition, and automatically sorts photos by when they were taken and who appears in them. This uses the same facial recognition technology that is used to auto-suggest tags on the main Facebook site, which isn’t breathtakingly accurate in our experience.

Unusually for Facebook, the photos you and your friends share in Moments won’t be automatically uploaded to the social network. You can select to upload specific images to share on your timeline, but by default they will remain private to you and the closed group of friends who you shared the images with.

The Moments app is available for iOS and Android, but it’s currently only available to users in the US. British users can access the Moments page on Google Play, but the app refuses to download to devices registered in the UK. It doesn’t yet appear in the UK App Store.

Facebook has released a barrage of mobile apps over the past couple of years. The site controversially spun off Messenger and Pages into separate apps, having previously incorporated their features in the single Facebook mobile app. Facebook also owns the Instagram photo app and the messaging service WhatsApp.