Facebook has today begun rolling out a new feature for Messenger which includes facial recognition that will recognise your Facebook friends from your camera roll and offer to share them with them.
Called Photo Magic, the feature is coming first to Australian Android users before rolling out to the rest of the world. The feature is opt-in and when Photo Magic recognises a friend you’ll be prompted to send the picture to them, it will even open a new message thread including multiple friends if there’s more than one person in the picture.
This feature beats Google to the punch with photo recognition, with Google Photos still not offering people grouping outside of the US. It’s a handy tool as we tend to take a lot of pics that languish in our camera roll. Facebook Messenger has now got over 700 million users, so this feature will definitely get some traction.
Check Messenger in Google Play for an update and then see what you think of Photo Magic.
“This feature beats Google to the punch with photo recognition, with Google Photos still not offering people grouping outside of the US.”
Untrue, this feature came to my droid about 1 week ago. Working fine.
Your DROID….where are you based? The Facial recognition feature in Google Photos can be enabled outside the US as we’ve shown, however if you have not performed this workaround this is not available outside the US.
I have not done any workarounds, (didn’t even know there was one). I live in Perth… Nexus 6
For the past week or so my Google Photos has this too with no workaround. Also in Perth with Nexus 5X
I was about to say, “Me too”, but then I remembered my phone connects to my works WiFi, and they are on a USA VPN.
How is this different to Facebook’s Moments app?
Facebook Moments requires the Moments app installed and in comparison the Moments app has minimal adoption whereas the Messenger app has over 700 Million active users.
Awesome. Now I won’t have to hear rubbish from all my friends about getting them to install a different app.