Facebook set to debut photo-sharing app for iPhone

Facebook is moving beyond its flagship mobile application, reportedly preparing to release a photo sharing application for the iPhone, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. The site obtained about 50MB of images and documents detailing the social networking site's plans.

Photos on Facebook are a big deal: about 6 billion photos are uploaded to the site every month, and it currently hosts about 100 billion images in total. That's a whole lot of photos, and plenty for an app like the one Facebook's planning to start out with.

The app's functionality is being described as "Path meets Instagram meets Color." Path acts as a photo journal of sorts, while the popular Instagram app allows for adding effects to mobile phone images. Finally, Color takes photos and makes them more social, showing the user pictures taken by other users near that location.

While Instagram has certainly been able to build up a following on its on, both Path and Color have not been able to replicate that level of success. An app built by a service like Facebook would obviously have a large user base that would make these features more useful for those who have downloaded it.

TechCrunch's MG Seigler says that while the app seems destined to be stand-alone when it is first introduced, it could eventually be integrated into Facebook's main iPhone app. Also missing are details on whether the company has plans to also release the app on the Android platform.

Further details will be released soon, Seigler says.