How To Download Your Facebook Photos to Your Computer

Many of us shoot photos with our cellphones and/or digital cameras, and upload those photos right in to Facebook.  It’s simple, easy and a kind of mindless way of storing all out pictures in one place. But what if we want to get them back to use or store someplace else? Sure, you could right-click and download them one at a time, but what if you have hundreds – or thousands – of photos?  That one-at-a-time method isn’t going to cut it.  So how can you download your Facebook photos from all of your albums all at one time?

There is a way, but Facebook doesn’t make it easy.

Prepare the data file

There are a lot of steps involved, but it’s not very complicated process.  The good news is that once you’re done, you’ll have a clean copy of all those pictures that you can store on your laptop, a Google drive or a thumb drive. If you want to tackle it, here are the steps.

1. Go log in to Facebook. Look for the drop down all the way at the top right of the browser window.

 

2. Click on the arrow. When you see the menu, scroll to the bottom and click on Settings. You can also just click on https://www.facebook.com/settings.

3. When the Settings window comes up, Click on the link at the very top of the screen that says Your Facebook Information:

4. In the Your Facebook Information dialog box, select the second option to Download Your Information

5. That will bring up the Download Your Information window. If you only want photos, click on Deselect All and then make sure you re-check the box for Photos.

6. The next thing you’re going to want to do is select a Date Range. In my case, I’m choosing All of my data but if you want a specific range, click on the drop down, select your range from the calendar and click OK.

7. Next, you have to select the Format for the media. It’s available as either HTML or JSON.  I’m selecting HTML.

8. And finally, I’m select the Quality as High.

9. Once that’s done, I’m going to hit the Create File button to start the process.

10. When you see this message, you’ll know the process is done.

This entire process is password protected and you can only do this for your personal or business page because you logged in to it.  You’ll get two emails from Facebook.  One confirming that you requested the download and a second letting you know when the download is ready.

Download and extract your photos

1. Open the Download is ready email and click on the Download Your Information link in the message.

2. You’ll be taken back to the Download Your Information page, except that this time, you’ll see the Available Files tab bolded. Click on that tab, and then click on the Download button on the right side of the dialog box.

3. That’s going to bring up a dialog box where you can enter your password to confirm your identity.

4. When the download is complete, you should see something like this at the bottom of your browser screen:

5. The file you get is going to be a compressed file, so you’re going to have to decompress it to view the actual files you wanted to see. Click on the file as shown above. If you don’t have something like WinZip or WinRar installed on your computer, Windows will open the file in a window similar to this one:

6. To view all of the photos Facebook style, click on the file labeled index.

7. If you’d prefer to save all of the images to your computer and view them by folder, click on the Extract All button…

8. And then chose a destination folder.

9. The folder that the files are extracted to will contain sub-folders that will be named (loosely) for the albums you’d created on Facebook. But at this point, you can go to any of those folders and browse through your pictures easily using Window’s built in tools.

That’s it.  Next time, try saving them to a cloud drive like Google, Dropbox, Apple Cloud or any of the others.  It’s way easier and less time consuming.