Backup Your Facebook Photos

Facebook might be the only place you can find many of the photos of me that exist online. But those photos are always at risk of disappearing if someone decides to delete their account or chooses to change their privacy settings. While I outline the ways you can avoid being tagged in photos in another article, those same tags are a handy way to find and backup any photo you appeared in. All you need is one simple app that authenticates with your Facebook account.

Backup Any Facebook Photo You Are Tagged In

To backup any Facebook photo you get tagged in, you need to download a free app called PhotoGrabber. It works with both Mac and Windows computers using the same simple process – authenticate your Facebook account, choose the photos you want to download, and go!

After you download and install PhotoGrabber, it will ask you for an authentication token from Facebook. This requires you to login to Facebook and approve the Photograbber just like you would any other app.

Assuming you click Okay on the screen below, the next PhotoGrabber screen will provide you with the code you need to paste into their app interface. I’m skipping that step here, since I’m not sure whether or not showing you that code would impact my Facebook account in some way.

Once you authenticate, you can choose to backup images you are tagged in, as well as images that your friends are tagged in too. You get to pick which folder the images are downloaded to on your computer and they are ultimately sorted into separate folders based on the name of the Facebook album they were originally included in.

You might also notice that PhotoGrabber also offers the option to download all photos in an album that contains photos you are tagged in. This can come in handy if you want to download the photos from an event you attended, regardless of whether or not you are in the picture.

The images retain the long file names used by Facebook, so if you want more meaningful filenames you might need to rename them. Depending on how many photos you are tagged in, the whole process could take awhile. And of course, if you plan to untag yourself on any photos, be sure to download the photos before untagging yourself.