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Tech Spec: Facebook Photo Sync and Messenger

Facebook Photo Sync makes sharing multimedia easier and more efficient. Photo by Courtland Jeffrey.
Facebook Photo Sync makes sharing multimedia easier and more efficient. Photo by Courtland Jeffrey.

Admit it, most everyone has a Facebook account. It connects you to your friends, coworkers, your aunt Judy and everyone else.

 

Facebook Photo Sync

Facebook is also an easy medium to transfer photos, with the use of posts and photo tagging. Within the last week, Facebook took another step towards easier photo sharing with their feature, Facebook Photo Sync.

Facebook Photo Sync is a new feature that instantly syncs the photos you take on your smartphone or tablet that has the Facebook app installed. What occurs is when you snap a photo on your device, it instantly sends a copy of the photo to a private album on your Facebook profile. This feature is meant to make the photo-sharing process even faster and allow for users to utilize Facebook as their photo backup source. The moment this feature was released, users were griping about how personal Facebook is getting.

Before you decide to go post another angry status on Facebook about how intrusive Facebook is, consider how the social media king set up this feature.

Facebook Photo Sync makes sharing multimedia easier and more efficient. Photo by Courtland Jeffrey.

First, the keyword to pay attention to when reading this is “private.” Only you can see the photos that get uploaded, unless of course you choose the “post photo” button. In other words, the only way this feature invades privacy is the fact that a copy of all of your photos are saved to a Facebook server somewhere (but then again, so are all of the other photos that you have published).

The other option users have is that they have the ability to go through and delete photos from this private album at any time. If you are still opposed to Facebook’s photo synchronization feature, simply make sure to leave it checked with “do not sync my photos” and Facebook will stay at arms length.

The beta version of Photo Sync has been available for a while now and I jumped aboard immediately. I like it because I can snap a photo and then instantly go over to my computer and pull it up to show others on a bigger screen. It also does not hurt to know that if I break my phone and cannot retrieve the data (I can sometimes be abusive to my smartphone), I have copies tucked away; I never have to worry again.

 

Facebook Messenger

Zuckerberg’s team also pumped out an update to their Messenger app for Android devices.

This new update does not bring any new UI, or user interface (how it looks), features to it, but it does offer a feature that allows users to create accounts with just their name and phone number. Like many other internet messengers, Facebook Messenger is looking to get more people on board with this easier setup. While this feature is not yet available in the United States, another update that allows Americans to take advantage of this feature, should be released in the next few weeks.

 

If you have any comments or questions about this story, message me on Twitter @Court_Jeffrey or email me at cejeffre@asu.edu. Happy posting!

 


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