Facebook Moments was introduced back in 2015 as a new way to share pictures of you and your friends by uploading them all to the FB app, where the company’s facial recognition technology could easily identify and let you share them with your friends. Unfortunately, facebook seems to have stopped there, and today, Facebook announced that it’ll be pulling the plug on Moments on February 25th, via CNET.

"Not enough people used the app, according to Facebook"

Moments was an interesting attempt for company to hook more users on app, but the app didn’t actually link those photos up to up to Facebook proper, leaving it in a sort of no man’s land. Facebook employed user data for things like figuring out who your friends are or when their birthdays are, but Moments photos themselves were stuck in a bad bubble — ultimately, it ended up being easier to just share photos to Facebook or use another service like Google Photos that was actively being developed.

That said, it does seem kind of odd that Facebook — a company that seems to prioritize gathering user data above all else — is giving up on capturing people’s photos through Moments, but it’s possible that the technology here could show up in the more mainstream Facebook app down the line now that Moments is ending. According to FB, the reason for the shutdown is simply that not enough users were using it, but on the other side, Facebook also never seemed to make it a priority to push people to use it (say, by adding new features, like bellow). 

Facebook has built a tool to help users rescue their photos from Moments, either by creating a private album of the pictures on their main Facebook account, or downloading them back to a device. Users will have until May to download or transfer their pictures before they’re gone for good.