Facebook revolutionized the way people communicate with each other online, and now it’s going to take that same type of mentality and apply it to new and fresh ideas to make its messaging app even better. Specifically, Facebook is looking to enhance the photo sharing process within Messenger. According to Facebook’s analytic research, Messenger users are sending photos at a rapidly growing rate and Facebook wants to capitalize on this trend of popularity. To do this it’s soft launching a new feature to the Messenger app in Australia called Photo Magic, which enables the app to scan the faces of people in your camera roll and prompt you with a question of whether or not you’d like to share the photo with them.
The idea behind this feature is such that users are able to more easily share the photos they likely intended to share in the first place, but ended up forgetting about in the process of taking so many pictures, leading to some of them getting lost in the mix. By utilizing this facial recognition software for your photos, you can take as many pictures as you’d like whether you’ll forget a few or not, and presumably Photo Magic will have your back on reminding you to send them out by asking if you still want to share them.
While the feature is available on Android, the regional soft launch keeps it away from U.S. users at the moment. Facebook did mention though that they have plans to continue the Photo Magic rollout in the months ahead, so there’s a chance those who use Messenger and share photos through it on this side of the world may end up seeing the feature sometime before the end of the year, perhaps not. Facebook has set the feature up to be “opt-in” so that means it won’t automatically start looking at all of your pictures, you’ll have to agree to use the feature, and give it permissions to access those photos. Once that’s done, it’ll look for a photo with a Facebook friend in it that you can share with that particular person. Moving forward, it can immediately suggest that you share pictures with any friend that it recognizes after you take new pictures.