Facebook Has a New Way for You to Share Your Baby Photos
Capturing life’s memories and sharing them instantly on social media with friends and family is a ritual for everyone with a WiFi signal these days. Especially if that person is going through a major life event. Whether it’s an engagement, a pregnancy announcement or the big baby name reveal, we love to give our friends and family a peek into our world. Open up your Facebook Feed these days and the top story is likely that your friend’s little one took their first steps, or your bro’s bb is a budding comedian and he has the LOL-worthy photo series to prove it. To help parents keep all those moments in one place, Facebook just launched a new feature that allows users to create a virtual scrapbook from the moment of their child’s birth until they’re old enough to claim their own profile and take over tagging duties.
Scrapbook, launching today and rolling out across the US on Facebook for desktop, iPhone and Android, enables users of the social media network to collect and organize all the baby photos they share into one stream instead of a cluttered feed or multiple photo albums between parents. The mission behind Scrapbook is twofold: to collect photos in a structured format while also introducing a space for users that will evolve as their children grow.
After adding your child as a family member to your profile (using a nickname or any name you want to give them) and allowing your partner tagging abilities, the digital scrapbooking can begin. From your child’s first step to moments at the zoo, upload it all so you never forget a memory and can revisit them whenever you open your phone.
With the mention of children and social media, privacy and overexposure come into question. The social media platform took that into consideration and will employ similar privacy photo features here as in the rest of your Facebook life. When you upload a photo the default setting will be private only to you. Only those that you invite and subscribe to the Scrapbook can see the growth of your little guy or gal, no creepers allowed.
We got a sneak peek at the feature from the father who created it (yes, little Rom in these images is a real-life baby and Scrapbook is a literal labor of love from proud new papa and Facebook Product Manager Dan Barak) and asked Dan if this was step one in setting up a transitional profile for someone who is too young to legally join the social network to eventually claim as their own. “In general, we believe that anyone who is on Facebook should manage their own identity,” He shared. “We don’t think there’s a place where you’ll have a special identity for your child once they are of age to join Facebook… We want to hear from parents how they’ll see this transition.” To be fair, Scrapbook isn’t introducing a NEW concept for parents (sharing their baby pix on social media) it’s just giving them a more beautiful way to do it. They haven’t heard concerns from parents about privacy yet because, as Dan puts it, Facebook is “just taking the same behavior they have and making it better.”
Since Easter is in the air, there’s a bonus “Easter egg” with this new feature — you’ll be able to add a pet to your Scrapbook as well. While we’re still going to be hand-making scrapbooks forever — we’re homemakers, after all — we definitely will be checking out the development of Scrapbook. There are a lot of babies and a lot dogs of B+C that have enough snaps to fill a few.
Will you be using Facebook’s new Scrapbook feature to create an ever-evolving photo book? Let us know in the comments.