Recently, the fact that digitally-stored memories on social media sites aren't going to last forever has has become much more of a feasible reality. Years and years of memories are relying on a service staying in business. What happens if they disappear (Pour one out for Myspace)?
Okay, so maybe Facebook isn't likely to disappear overnight, but as it's quite known that Facebook usage is dwindling and people are beginning to slowly deactivate their accounts. When your friends accounts disappear, so do to those tagged photo memories of yourself. To me, that was a closer reality than Facebook itself disappearing.
I wanted to put this quick guide together for people like me, who might be looking to download both personal photos and tagged photos from Facebook, as from my searching, it seems like some had trouble in finding the correct way.
So how do you back up your tagged Facebook photos in 2022?
Prerequisites:
- You will need a desktop system
- You will need a web browser capable of installing extensions
Downloading your personal photos
Downloading your own uploaded photos from Facebook is surprisingly easy.
On the desktop, navigate to Facebook's Download Your Information page.
For the settings, select HTML and changer the date-range to All time.
Facebook categorises photos and videos under Posts - so I'd recommend unselecting everything else and just clicking 'Posts'
At the bottom of the page, select Request a download and follow the instructions
Simple enough!
Downloading your tagged Facebook photos
Understandably, Facebook doesn't natively supply this functionality, as someone elses photos isn't your data to download. That doesn't mean it's not possible, though.
The way around this is to use browser extensions. These extensions will typically cycle through the photos on the album page and generate download links. I tried a few, but most of them weren't really intuitive as they would literally open each photo and grab a link (to varying levels of success).
I landed on Tagged Photo Exporter for Facebook. This is a really nice extension that offers entire album downloads in around 2-3 clicks. Here's how:
Install the extension to your Chrome-extension compatible web browser
On said web browser, navigate to the Facebook album which you'd like to download. In my case, this was Tagged Photos of You
Click the extensions icon in your extension tray, and you'll be met with a big button to export photos:
Stay on the page and wait for it to cycle, it'll take a few minutes depending on the size of the album
When it's done, it will open up a local webpage which displays all of the photos, all you need to do is click Save Page As, and your photos are downloaded!
That really is all there is to it. You should do this for as many albums that you want to preserve. It was quite a nice feeling that what I thought would be quite awkward to do actually turned out pretty straight forward!