Facebook (FB) has begun phasing out its three-year-old photo syncing feature, a reflection of how consumer habits have shifted around smartphones.
The feature, introduced in 2012, allowed users to activate the automatic upload of photos that they had taken using their mobile phones to a private album on Facebook. There, a user could review them and choose to share them or remove them.
It was a handy feature at a time when many people still primarily uploaded photos using desktop computers. That has changed, of course, as smartphone adoption has increased and faster 4G/LTE wireless connections have become more prevalent.
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Facebook first notified users in December that it would begin to halt support for the feature.
There are ways to recover images that were processed using the feature. Facebook says previously synchronized photos can be moved to its new Moments app, where they can be viewed, downloaded, or deleted. The photos can also be downloaded as a collection in the form of a zip file or deleted directly within a Facebook profile page.
