After expanding the test to iOS users last week, Facebook has officially launched Photo Sync for both Android and iOS devices. Photo Sync allows users to enable automatic uploading of any photos they take with their mobile device straight to Facebook. No manual uploading, no hassle. Just seamless photo uploading.
And sharing of course. But the sharing is where you’ll have to make some decisions. With Photo Sync, all of your photos are automatically uploaded to Facebook, but they aren’t automatically posted to your Timeline. Any photo uploaded via Photo Sync will appear in a separate, private folder within your Facebook photos. From there, you can choose which (if any) photos you want to publish to your friends.
“Today we’re excited to roll out photo sync, which makes it easier to share photos. With this feature, photos from your phone sync automatically to a private album on the web. When you want to share these photos, just pick and post your favorites,” says Facebook. “We began testing photo sync in August and will continue to make it available to more people.”
All you have to do to enable Photo Sync is go to your photos section and find the “sync” button. It will appear at the bottom of your photos section on the mobile app. You can also set up Photo Sync via desktop.
Once you start using Photo Sync, you’ll have 2GB worth of storage. Yes, Facebook just dug itself a little bit deeper into the cloud storage game. Even if you don’t choose to make any of your automatically-uploaded photos public, you can store them all in a 2GB cloud locker for free.
Here’s what Facebook says about when they sync your photos:
We generally try to sync your photos as soon as you take them. However, we also take into account a number of factors, such as your battery level and sync settings. New photos that you take will be privately synced as you take them. In your syncing settings, you can choose to sync over Wi-Fi and your cellular network, sync or over Wi-Fi only, or turn syncing off entirely. You can also choose to sync all photos in your camera roll over wifi and see how much storage space you have available.
When you sync over a 3G or 4G connection, Facebook uploads your photos at a smaller size (100K). When you are uploading via Wi-Fi, Facebook will bump the size back up.
So, if you always wanted to share more photos with your Facebook friends but were impeded by your severe disdain for waiting eight seconds for the photo to upload, your lucky day has arrived.