Life

How To Download Your Old Facebook Photos So You Can Keep A Backup

by Syeda Khaula Saad
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Facebook is a great platform to share and store photos on. And if you've been using it since the days of its inception, you probably have plenty of photos saved up from over the years and stored on your account. But instead of leaving your photos up to the unpredictable world of social media, you might want to know how to download your old Facebook photos so you can create a backup, just to be on the safe side.

If you only have a few select Facebook photos or profile pictures you want to download, you can start by clicking on those photos individually and then hitting "Options" in the bottom right hand corner of the picture (it'll pop up if you hover your mouse over the photo). From there, you simply select "Download" for each picture. The same process applies to friends' photos that you were tagged in.

And if you want to download an entire Facebook photo album, that's pretty easy as well. All you have to do is click into the album, select the little gear icon in the top right corner, and then click "Download Album." The gear icon, for reference, is immediately to the right of the "Tag" button. But when it comes to downloading your entire library of photos, you'll have to take a slightly different route.

So, if you want to download all of your Facebook photos at once, you have to first go to the drop-down arrow located on the right side of the blue bar up top. From there, you click on "Settings." After this, look for the menu bar on the left and click on "Your Facebook Information" (it's the third option down from the top). Then, if you click the "view" option next to "Download Your Information," you should be taken to a page that'll help you download all of your Facebook data. You can choose from options like Comments, Likes and Reactions, and Friends, so if you want to include those categories in your file, keep them selected.

But if you only want to deal with your photos, click the "Deselect All" link on the top right, and then re-select only "Photos and Videos." After this, you have to choose whether you'd prefer to download your Facebook data in HTML or JSON. As Facebook says on that page, "You can choose to receive your information in an HTML format that is easy to view, or a JSON format, which could allow another service to more easily import it." You can also pick a date range if you want, or you can keep "all of my data" selected in the Date Range box.

Syeda Khaula Saad/Bustle

From there, all you have to do is select "Create File," and within a few minutes, Facebook will have prepared a file that will contain all of your photos, which you can download to your preferred device. After that, all of your photos should be readily available for you to store.

Although Facebook has been reliable all these years in keeping your photos stored, it never hurts to have an extra backup of all of your favorite memories.