Facebook is shifting the movie-making Slideshow feature from its Moments app to its flagship iOS app in an attempt to counter Apple's Photos update in iOS 10.
For those unfamiliar with Apple's big addition to its Photos app coming in iOS 10, a new feature called Memories uses facial- and object-recognition to automatically cluster photos based on people, scenes, dates, and locations, and intelligently creates mini-movies of occasions like vacations, birthdays, and weddings.
Similarly, Facebook's Slideshow feature, which originally appeared in August as part of its photo-centric Moments app, combines user photos and videos into a short clip that can be customized with transitions, themes, and music soundtracks.
In its new manifestation in Facebook's flagship app, the feature will now do this automatically whenever users take at least five photos or videos in the last 24 hours. And if users come upon a slideshow in the News Feed, they can tap a "try it" option to make their own. Images can be edited to add or remove images, and themes include Nostalgic, Playful, Night Out, Birthday, Epic, Thankful, Tropical, Bollywood, and Amped.
The move represents a direct attempt by the company to take on Apple's movie-making feature in iOS 10, which is coming this fall, although both companies are actually playing catch-up to Google, which offered a similar feature last year as part of Google Photos Assistant.
Earlier this month, Facebook attracted the ire of users by forcing account holders to download its Moments app if they wanted to keep synced photo albums uploaded from their mobile devices.
Users were informed by email and via app notifications that these albums will cease to exist on July 7, and that they should either download the albums, or install the company's photo-centric Moments app to keep them in the cloud.
Facebook is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]
