Facebook will delete your synced photos unless you download the Moments app

Facebook users, mark your calendars for July 7. That’s do-or-die day for some of those pics of your family, friends and neighbors you have stored there.

Here’s Facebook’s line in the sand: Download its private photo-sharing app called Moments by July 7 or you risk losing all the photos you have synced to Facebook from your cell phone.

Users who don’t want to download Moments, which was released in June 2015, will have to rescue their synced photos by downloading a zip file of them from Facebook to a computer before July 7, the company is telling users.

“Photos you privately synced from your phone to Facebook will be deleted soon. Earlier this year, they were moved to Moments, a new app from Facebook,”a notification from Facebook said.

“The Moments app lets you organize and privately share photos from your phone, and download or delete photos you’ve synced to Facebook.

“If you want to keep these photos, download and log into Moments before July 7.”

The “heavy-handed push,” as TechCrunch calls it, appears to be working. As of Monday morning, Moments was the No. 1 free app in the App Store and No. 2 in Google Play, ABC News reported.

Some users are not happy that Facebook is “forcing” them to use the app.

“Facebook is using notifications to spread this message, and further details can also be viewed from the Synced album’s page on Facebook (if Moments is not yet installed),” reports TechCrunch.

“The company has also taken the step of actually emailing users and telling them to install the app, which is unusual, but necessary now that it has plans to delete their data.”

Moments lets users privately upload photos to share with friends without actually putting them on Facebook. Using face-recognition technology, Moments scans photos for familiar faces and lets users quickly “sync” them to the subject of the pic.

The removal of the synced photos won’t affect any photos or videos shared on Facebook separately from the synced album, according to The Guardian.

Many Facebook users have probably forgotten that they have a “Synced” album of photos, TechCrunch said.

The “Synced” album is what’s disappearing on July 7, not all your Facebook photos and not all the ones users uploaded from their phones, said TechCrunch.

“Of course, some Facebook users may not understand this, having long ago forgotten about the photo sync feature. It’s possible that a portion may think that Facebook is actually threatening to delete their photo archives if they don’t install Moments,” said TechCrunch.

This story was originally published June 13, 2016 at 2:16 PM with the headline "Facebook will delete your synced photos unless you download the Moments app."