Facebook Moments takes on Google Photos and Flickr

The latest addition to Facebook’s growing portfolio of mobile applications is a photo sharing app called Moments. The Moments app is available on Apple App store and Google Play Store for the US, but there’s no word on global availability yet. This app essentially is a cloud storage service, which allows you to upload photos clicked and stored in the phone.

Uploading to Moments is no way related to sharing a photo on Facebook or Instagram. The basic idea is to share the photos clicked at a party or an outing with friends and family with a select group of people—the catch being, the sharing can be done only with contacts who also have Moments app installed on their phones. It is more of a private platform where images are automatically arranged into groups based on the event, date and place where they were taken.

The most interesting feature of this app is perhaps the one that works in the background—Facebook’s powerful facial recognition algorithm that identifies the faces of friends in the photos and if these people have the app, then the image will only be shared with them and not everyone on your friend or contact list. If you don’t have Moments, the other option for users now is to share individual photos with each friend with Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or email.

Moments allows sharing of multiple photos with a single friend, or a group, and they can return the favour. Any photo shared with you through Moments can be downloaded and saved on the phone. If someone still wants to share these photos on Instagram and Facebook, that can optionally be done from within the Moments app itself.

How is it different from Flickr and Google Photos

In some ways, Facebook is pitting Moments against Google Photos and Yahoo Flickr apps, which are already popular.

Google recently rejigged the Photos app and separated it from the Google+ social network, transforming Google Photos from an image sharing service to a free-to-use cloud storage. There is a catch, though—if you accept the condition that every image you upload here will be limited to a 16-megapixel resolution, you get the benefit of unlimited storage space. However, if you want to upload images in their original size, then the storage is limited to the Gmail + Google Drive plan. Google Photos also offers fairly detailed editing tools, as well as the ability to add filters to the photos.

Yahoo recently updated Flickr, improving usability and introducing a powerful search function. If you have a collection of a million photos saved on Flickr, and perhaps want to search for a “red car”, it will pull out all photos of red cars. It offers 1TB of storage for free, irrespective of the resolution of photos. It also has filters and editing tools.

Moments does not allow any photo editing at the moment, and Facebook has not specified the amount of storage a user will be limited to, if at all.