In time for the festive season, Facebook has added a variety of updates to its Facebook Messenger app to make sharing photos easier, get everyone into the festive mood, as well as making the app more customizable.

Facebook Messenger helps you share your photos

With more than 9.5 billion photos sent on Facebook Messenger, the company is now making it easier for you to send photos through the app as soon as you take them.

Facebook is making its Photo Magic face recognition available to more people. Once you take a photo, Facebook Messenger will help you send your photo straight away. Working in the same way as tagging or sharing photos on Facebook, Photo Magic will recognize your Facebook friends in your photo. Messenger will then create a group thread in two easy steps and your friends in your photo will immediately receive a copy.

To share your photo, make sure you enable the Photo Magic feature. You can enable it in the Settings menu in Messenger, but Facebook will also be prompting you to try the new feature or you can opt out. Once you take a photo, you will see a popup to send the photos to your friends; Facebook Messenger will not send the photo until you opt to do so. Simply hit “Cancel” if you decide not to share it.

According to VentureBeat, the Photo Magic feature will be available worldwide, except for those in Canada and in the European Union.

Customize your conversations

Facebook Messenger is also making it possible to customize your conversations, with the inclusion of various colors for your conversations, the ability to set nicknames and the ability to change the emoji response to meetups from the usual thumbs up to an alternative emoji. Anyone included in the conversation can make changes to nicknames, emojis or colors as many times as they want.

Some holiday cheer comes to Facebook Messenger

Facebook are bringing snowflakes to Messenger. When you send someone a Santa, Christmas tree or snow-related sticker, snowflakes will appear in the background of your conversation.

For Android users, Facebook Messenger is also bringing back the snow globe effect for chat heads, if you are north of the Equator. To celebrate the New Year, confetti will fill your friends’ chat heads.

For all the Facebook Messenger sticker fans out there, not only is the holiday sticker pack available, but there is also a sticker pack for the movie Frozen as well as Star Wars.

Images via Facebook