Facebook is about to delete photos from your account in an attempt to push its new photo app

Save them before they're gone

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Facebook is about to delete a group of photos on your phone, although you might not know or even care that they’re there. The reason you might not have noticed them is because they’re hiding in a private “synced from phone” section of your Facebook photos. This photo section was created in 2012 when Facebook offered you the option to automatically upload all photos captured on your phone to a private folder in order to make it easier to share them at a later date.

However, now Facebook is attempting to encourage users to adopt the Moments app to share their photos so this feature is being phased out and any photos not extracted from this private folder if you have it before 7 July will be deleted. Moments launched in June 2015, so it’s been around for a while, and it offers a more private way to share your photos, addressing the needs of users who want a social platform to share their photos but not in public posts.

Rather than automatically syncing everything to one folder and leaving it there, Moments scans your photos, organising them by events, and identifying your friends' faces so that you can easily share the photos directly with them.

We’ve seen Facebook attempt to influence user behaviour and feature adoption with moves like this before, when they pushed for the adoption of the dedicated Messenger app by disabling the ability to access and respond to messages in the main app. This is a similar act of persuasion - to save these photos if they’re not stored on your phone, users can either download them from Facebook onto a computer, or they can download the Moments app before 7 July and transfer them over.