You go to a party, you take some photos with your smartphone, your friends do too. But how to get the pictures to the people who matter? Sharing photos from events you enjoyed with friends has been a problem that technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more have been attacking for a decade or so. With its Moments iPhone app, Facebook takes a lot of the pain out of the process. Moments finds photos in your phone from events based on time taken and people present and lets you easily, privately share photo sets and create attractive slideshow videos, complete with titles and musical soundtracks.
Starting Up
Moments is available for Android and iOS; I installed the 67MB download on my iPhone 6s ( at Amazon) . The download size may sound a bit large, but the app includes surprisingly deep video-editing capability and content, once you dig into it. After I signed into my Facebook account (a simple button press, since I was already signed into my account on my iPhone) and allowed access to my photos, the app gathered groups of photos from events and made suggestions about people who might like to see the pictures.
The app doesn't automatically add photos to a Moment from multiple participants, but after you create a Moment, any friends you've shared it with can add their own photos. Other apps like Instagram and Flickr ($0.00 at Apple.com) let you create shared albums, but they don't automate the process or create slideshow videos as Moments does.
Interface
As you'd expect from a software powerhouse like Facebook, the Moments app's interface is slick and modern, with intuitive, easy swiping gestures. Just swipe to the left to discard a suggested photo set, or swipe to the right to share it. You don't have to stick with all the photos in the suggested group; in fact, you definitely won't want to if the photos included in the sets resemble mine. These usually included the odd shot of the street or a blurry wall along with the good images of people and scenery.
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Once you've got the photo set properly trimmed down, you can simply tap "Send to…" to either just send it to the suggested friend or choose friends on your own. Some photo sets will just say "Send these photos to friends," though most suggest a contact who might like to see the pictures. If the friends don't have the Moments app, they'll get a message in Facebook Messenger showing the cover photo of the set and a link to download the app. You can add more friends as viewers later, too.
I do find it a limitation that friends can't view the sets unless they have the app—not on the Web or in the Facebook app. Another quibble is that I'd like to be able to open a friend's profile in the Facebook app, as you can in Messenger. A bit more integration with the main Facebook service is what I'd like, though I do see the privacy advantages in keeping Moments separate. The ability to include videos as well as still photos would also be nice.
The app's possibilities don't end after your friends have the photo set. Collaborators can add their own photos and post comments, too. When a friend adds photos to your set, you get the opportunity to Thank them via a little link, which also triggers a notification. Notifications are accessible from the last icon along the bottom of the app screen, and as with most such Facebook features, it displays a small number showing how many notifications you've got. These include any new shared photo sets, comments, and added photos.
Since it's not such a big feat for the app to suggest photos of friends you've already tagged in Facebook, the Browse section also lets you look in your non-shared photos in your camera roll. And you can simply create your own Moments with any photos you choose, without using the apps suggestions.
Another section of the app is Ask. This is simply where you can ask a friend, say Nancy, to send you their photos of you. After asking, the app tells you that you have photos that Nancy may want shared with her.
Slideshow Videos
If you tap Hide, to hide the suggested Moments in the top-left of the home screen, you see your accepted Moments. Tap on the title of one of these, and the app shows a video at the top of the photo grid sporting the telltale Play triangle button. You can add a title, and then tapping the play button takes you into the super simple slideshow video editor. Here you can choose from 18 mood-themed musical soundtracks, add or remove photos, and add text subtitles.
The music is timed perfectly with the created slideshow, and the default choice, Inspired, is uplifting, while Merry, Festive, Thankful, Adventurous, Joyful, Amped, and more are among the other choices. I ran into what must be a bug here: After changing the music and previewing and sending the video, the music reverted to the default Inspired tune. A nice touch is the pan-and-zoom effect, which adds drama and interest to still photos.
Sharing a video slideshow created in Moments has an important advantage over standard Moment sharing: It sends your video as a regular Facebook video post you can share with whichever audience you choose (I chose Close Friends), rather than just sharing it inside the app. One oddity is that you can't create a video before sending a Moment as a photo set.
You can even get a link to share this kind of video to people not on Facebook, should you happen to know any such people. By default, the video posts as only visible to yourself and the people tagged in it, but you can change the privacy setting to any subset of your Facebook contacts or the public. I wish there was an option also to share via Messenger ($0.00 at Apple.com) , however. As with any Web video, a couple of minutes processing time is needed before the video is viewable.
Savor the Moments
Moments is great for visits and trips, after which you may not want to manually sift through your iPhone photos to find the pictures your pals would want to see. It's simple to use, yet more powerful than it appears at first glance, with custom slideshow video creation and commenting. It's not perfect, but Moments can offer a big assist when it comes to sharing photos of your memorable occasions.
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