If you sync photos from your phone to Facebook, you're going to need to download another app.
Facebook has started alerting people that photos privately uploaded from a phone will only be seen in Moments, a standalone photo syncing app for iPhone and Android the social network released in June.
The change goes into effect January 10 and was first spotted by TechCrunch.
"Starting this week, we are beginning to phase out Facebook's photo syncing feature," a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Tech Insider. "People that use photo syncing will have the option to move the photos they've previously synced to our new app Moments, where they will be able to view, download, or delete them. If they don't want to download Moments, they will also be able to download a zip file of their synced photos on their computer, or delete them through their Facebook profiles."
Photos you want to share on your Facebook profile for others to see can still be uploaded from the main Facebook app.
Experiencing a case of déjà vu? That's because Facebook did something similar in April of 2014 when it forced everyone to download the Messenger app to access the main app's messaging features. The decision was met with plenty of criticism initially, but Messenger's growth has since skyrocketed to 700 million users, making it one of the most popular apps in the world.
The main difference between Facebook making people download Messenger and now Moments is that messaging is a core part of the social network, while not everyone privately backs up their photos. The Facebook app's photo syncing feature was launched in 2012 as a way to automatically back up photos taken on a phone and have the option of sharing them with friends later.
The Moments app uses Facebook's facial recognition technology (which also powers the auto-tagging feature) to find photos of your friends from your phone's camera roll and prompt you to share them directly with those people through Facebook.
It's essentially a Facebook-centric version of Google Photos, which also backs up photos to the cloud and uses facial recognition to scan your library.
As TechCrunch noted in October, Facebook has been promoting the Moments app in peoples' News Feeds recently, which has helped the app climb the App Store's charts.
