Facebook has broadly launched a feature it began testing earlier this year that automatically syncs photos you take on your mobile phone to a private album on the social network where you can later choose to share them if you want.
If you have the latest Facebook app for Android or iPhone, you’ll now see a notification about photo sync when you visit your timeline using your handset.
If you turn photo sync on, Facebook will upload all the photos you have saved on your phone, as well as any future shots you take — up to 2 GB worth of images. To use photo sync on an iPhone, you need to be running iOS 6.
You can also turn on photo sync from your computer by going to your timeline>Photos>Synced From Phone.
Facebook says it will generally sync user photos as soon as people take them, but will wait to do so if a phone’s battery is running low. It also will sync smaller versions of your photos when you’re using cellular data, and larger size photos when you’re on Wi-Fi.
To shut off photo sync in the Android Facebook app, go to the menu on the top left of your phone display, scroll down and tap Account > App Settings > Sync Photos. From there, choose “Don’t sync my photos.” In the iPhone app, go to your timeline, tap Photos> Synced>Settings (the gear icon) and choose “Turn off Photo Sync.”
In these areas you can also choose if you want photos to sync using your cellular network and Wi-Fi or only Wi-Fi, as well as see how much of your 2 GB cloud storage you’ve used.
Photo sync isn’t available for feature phone users.
Visit Facebook’s photo sync page for more information.