Facebook has launched a new standalone app called Moments to help photo-enthusiasts organize and share snapshots. But what makes this different from simply sharing photos on Facebook?

According to Facebook Product Manager Will Ruben, Moments is a “private way to give photos to friends and get the photos you didn’t take,” to share photos from big events like weddings and concerts.

The Moments app uses facial recognition to recognize photo subjects. In hopes of boosting users, Moments will invite recognized friends to install the app if they don’t already have it. This could ultimately work in your favor, as more social connections means more opportunities to sync photos by event or location.

What it does

By syncing photos from your phone to the app, it’s easy enough to share event photos to other Moments users. If the app detects that a friend has a similar album based on the same event, date and time, the app organizes all the photos into one location – no more waiting for friends to send pictures.  Moments also has a search function to track down photos.

It’s private

Photos synced to the Moments app remain private to you unless you choose to share with select users. Shared photos still aren’t public, and can only be viewed by the selected users.  This means you can decide which photos never see the light of day, and which are synced and available for sharing to other social platforms.

Availability

Facebook Moments is now available for download from the App Store or Google Play for those in the U.S. For those in other territories, Ruben stated that the app will be rolling out to more countries but did not specify as to when that would happen. The app is free to download and you can find out more about the app here.

This looks familiar

If you’re feeling a bit of a déjà vu, it’s because the features of Moments are nothing new to the mobile app world.

iOS users have the iCloud Photo Sharing feature which allows them to share photos or albums to specific people or groups or create an album and add people who can see and add photos to the said album. No need to install a separate app. as it comes standard with the mobile operating system.

Another thing to be noted here is that it looks like Facebook took not only a page, but the whole manual of Cluster Labs, Inc. which created the private photo sharing app Cluster. Cluster is available for both iOS and Android, just like Moments; it allows users to create a multitude of albums and decide which ones to keep for themselves and select which people to share them with. Photos can be organized based on the people in the photos or by occasion or events, and enables invited people to share photos to the album. Cluster also features notifications for when someone adds a new content and the option to see which users have viewed shared images.

Facebook has a knack of creating clones of popular apps and services such as Slingshot. dubbed as a Snapchat competitor with more features, but it didn’t do so well. Being a social networking giant doesn’t guarantee the success of its spin off apps. So will this Moments app fare better than Slingshot? Only time can tell.

Image source: Facebook