Skip to main content

Facebook’s photo-sharing app Moments now lets you share videos as part of major update

facebook recommendations social network app smartphone
bloomua/123rf
Facebook pretty much abandoned its push into stand-alone apps at the end of last year by closing its Creative Labs division. One app that didn’t get relegated to the cutting block, however, was Moments.

As it turns out, the photo-sharing app is actually quite popular. Moments’ users have shared more than 400 million photos since its launch last year. To celebrate that milestone, Facebook has launched a major update to the app, which now lets you share videos alongside images.

For those who aren’t familiar with Moments, the app is built for private photo sharing. Using AI, it identifies who’s in your images and when they were taken, allowing it to suggest who you should then share your photos with. Once you send a photo to someone, they will be notified via Facebook and Messenger, allowing them to log in to Moments and contribute their own images from the same event. With the new update (available right now for iOS and Android) you can also upload videos to those collections.

Additionally, Facebook claims that you’ll soon be able to add videos to your shareable slideshows in Moments — these are the short videos set to music that can be created using a selection of images — which can then be shared via Facebook, reports TechCrunch.

A major part of Moments’ success can be attributed to Facebook’s heavy marketing of the app. The likes of Slingshot and Riff failed due to the social network’s insistence on an organic strategy for its standalone products, which was reliant upon positive word-of-mouth. Its unorthodox treatment of Moments, on the other hand, has included promotion on the Facebook news feed, and via Messenger (as described above). The social network also recently made its handy photo-sync feature a Moments exclusive, further driving mobile users to the app.

Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
What is a Facebook Pixel? Meta’s tracking tool, explained
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

If you have a website for your business and you're wondering how well your ads are reaching prospective customers, you'll probably want to be able to measure that to make sure that the money you've spent on advertising for your business is money well spent. Meta (the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram) offers a tool that can measure that by capturing how your customers interact with your business' website.

At one point, this tool was known as a Facebook Pixel. But since the technology company's recent rebranding to Meta, the tool also underwent a name change and is now known as the Meta Pixel.

Read more
Meta found over 400 mobile apps ‘designed to steal’ Facebook logins
Social media mobile apps on a smartphone screen, all on a textured gray fabric background.

If you frequently use your Facebook login to sign into new mobile apps you've installed, you may want to pay attention to Meta's latest announcement.

On Friday, Facebook's parent company Meta published a blog post written by its Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich, and Ryan Victory, a Malware Discovery and Detection engineer at Meta. The post detailed Meta's discovery of over 400 mobile apps "that target people across the internet to steal their Facebook login information." Essentially, Meta found hundreds of mobile apps that were "designed to steal"  the login information of Facebook users by having those users log in to these apps with their Facebook login information.

Read more
TikTok pivots to photos while its competitors are still chasing its viral videos
Smartphone with TikTok's Photo Mode all on a white background.

TikTok's competitors have been all over the news recently for essentially copying the short-form video sharing app's  most successful moves. But while everyone else is pivoting to video, TikTok is now taking swings in the other direction: photos.

On Thursday, TikTok announced a slew of new editing and creation features, but the one tool that caught our eye was Photo Mode. Because the image that TikTok shared in its official announcement depicted a photo carousel-style image post that looks a lot like Instagram.

Read more