With Facebook essentially removing the ability to chat with your friends directly within the Facebook app and requiring you to download a separate app, the company has at the very least made up for it by introducing new features to help make the Messenger app a more richer and fulfilling experience.
In the latest update that Facebook has issued, the company has introduced facial recognition for photos in Messenger. Dubbed Photo Magic, basically when you enable this feature, the app will scan your photo library and try to look for photos that might contain faces of people you know on Facebook.
When it detects that there are photos, you have the option of sending those photos to them, or if it’s a group photo, the app is apparently smart enough to create a group with those people so that you can share the photo easily. From there on, if you were to take photos of your friends, the app will be able to recognize those faces and then prompt you into sharing it with the person you’re taking a photo of.
This sounds very similar to the Facebook Moments app that was launched earlier this year, and unsurprisingly so because according to The Verge, both teams (the Messenger and Moments teams) collaborated on this feature. The update will be rolling out in stages and will begin in Australia with Android, followed by iOS a few days later with the rest of the world expecting the update in the coming months.