Facebook is not the best place to keep a backup of your photos, for various reasons. But it’s not hard to transfer your photos from the social network to a cloud service like Google Images.
Facebook photos
Downloading your Facebook photos is actually not so much work, but to categorize them in a logical way is more trouble. The problem is that when uploading photos to Facebook, all EXIF data is lost, so information like the time and date the photo was taken is no longer available. The file name of the photos turns into a long string of numbers. Difficult, especially if many photos are linked to your Facebook account.
Another disadvantage is that the maximum size of pictures on Facebook is only 800 by 600 pixels. The social network reduces and compresses pictures to prevent taking more space than 100KB. If you still want to download them, you can go through the steps below.
- Log in using your PC on Facebook and open the Settings button on the upper right.
- Under the heading “General” you will find the link to download a copy of your Facebook data. Click on it.
- You can now make a request to download your Facebook data. Within five minutes, you will receive an email with a download link.
- Download the zip file, unzip it, and you find all your photos in the Photos folder.
Switch to Google Photos
The next step is to upload your photos to Google Photos. Go to photos.google.com and log in with the Google account you want to use for backing up your photos. Touch the top right cloud to begin uploading. You can then choose whether you want to upload pictures with high quality (fine for photos with a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels) or the uncompressed originals.
As photos of Facebook have a low resolution, you can go for the first option. Google will give you 15GB free storage in the cloud, but in the case of “high quality”, you can continue to upload unlimited photos.
Would you like to create order in the newly created chaos, then it is good to place your photos into albums. On Google Photos, click on the plus sign at the top and select the shots you want together. Give the album a relevant name so that you can easily find your collections in the Google Photos app on your smartphone