Are your photos scattered across a few laptops, your smartphone, and maybe even the Internet? Are there some on Facebook and Flickr that you'd really like to consolidate to one location?
Cleaning up all your photos is a crazy huge project, and you should take it one step at a time. (If you're interested in doing a whole lot more organizing, check out the Get Organized ebook, available for Kindle, iPad, and other platforms.) One of the biggest steps on most people's lists is downloading Facebook photos. Facebook is, after all one of the biggest repositories of photos on the Web. If that's the stage you're at, here's how to do it.
How to Download Facebook Photos
Before you start, know that downloading all your photos from Facebook takes a little longer than you might expect, although the time is mostly spent waiting. It's not active time.
I include that time warning because if you have a project in mind in which you want to use the photos, this lag could set your entire progress back. Be sure to initiate a download of your Facebook photos at least one day before you actually need to work with the images.
1. Go to your Account Settings in Facebook (gear icon in the top right).
2. On the left side, select General. You'll see a list of choices, and below them, in a totally different font, you'll see a link to Download your data. Select it.
3. Click on "Download a copy of your Facebook data" and click through the next few prompts asking to start your archive and whatnot.
4. Check your email for a confirmation message. Now, you'll likely have to wait a little while, perhaps half an hour, or as long as a day or two, until you get another message saying the archive has been created and is ready for you to download.
5. When you receive the email saying your archive is ready to download, just follow the link to download the file. Inside, you'll find a folder called Photos—and a whole lot more. There's no way to download only photos and not other data, but at least the pictures are collected into one place.
Inside, you'll find more subfolders, all poorly named with gibberish. But if you look back at your Facebook account at your albums, you'll quickly see that each subfolder matches to an album. My advice is to rename the folders with the album name, or a new name if you have a better idea now. I would not bother renaming all the image files if you have a lot of them, but rather only renaming the folders with some intelligent names. From there, you can integrate these folders with your other locally stored images, and continue consolidating all your other scattered images in the same way.
Now What? Organization and Storage
You'll notice that your Facebook photos came packaged in folders. Those folders have names that simply do not make any sense whatsoever to the human eye, but the folders and their contents match up with your Facebook albums. It can be hard to tell, though, when you have hundreds or even thousands of photos.
Your first folder is likely to be your profile pictures (preview a few images to be sure). Once you know the album, you can rename the folder accordingly. For tips and thorough advice on naming conventions for folders, see Use Folders to Unclutter Your Desktop.
I recommend moving your Facebook photos (and all your other photos, really) to one location that's regularly backed up. If you don't already have a location in mind, I'd suggest using a file-syncing account, such as Dropbox, SugarSync
Some file-syncing and storage solutions come with a pre-made "Photos" folder, which you can use as a dumping ground for your Facebook pictures and more, or you can create your own folder.
If you use a file-syncing program to centralize your photos, definitely look into the affiliated mobile app. Several file-syncing providers, including SugarSync, Dropbox, and Bitcasa, have an "instant upload" feature that automatically sends all the photos you take on a mobile device to your account. This same feature works for all photos you take going forward as well as all the existing photos on your phone. It's supremely convenient.
If you think you'll remember your photos best by whether they were post on Facebook, then I would keep all the Facebook pictures grouped together, or at the very least use the word "Facebook" in the sub-folder names.
With your Facebook photos all downloaded and collected, you probably will want to next tackle taking control of all your digital photos.
Get Organized is a weekly series of articles on PCMag.com to help you keep your digital files and online life organized. Check back every Monday for new tips and tricks. For more from Jill Duffy, follow her on Twitter @jilleduffy.
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