I write a lot about problems that Facebook causes, but it’s not because I hate Facebook. I think Facebook has been great at doing exactly what it set out to do: capture users and their data. MySpace is dying, Friendster is a memory, but Facebook is rapidly passing the 500 million user mark. Lots of users means lots of problems. And predictably, most of the issues with Facebook have less to do with what Facebook is than how it’s used.
One specific area of Facebook that is difficult to manage is photo content. Facebook intentionally makes it very easy to collect your data, but difficult to get rid of it. This is by design: the more of your data they have, the more things they can do with it, and the more attractive they are to the big money that wants to access that data. Some people are not happy about this, and have gone so far as to delete their account.
I don’t want to do that, and you probably don’t either. Facebook is enormous, and is a fantastic resource for making social and personal connections. My solution has been to leave just a little information (such as pictures, basic biography) that I don’t mind anybody seeing, and downloading the rest.
Here are six applications that you might find useful for managing photo content. They may have been created with the intention of saving your precious memories, but to the trained eye they are actually online reputation tools.
Fotobounce
http://fotobounce.com/index.php
Fotobounce is an Adobe AIR application that I found to be useful. A decent photo manager in its own right (with features like facial recognition, tagging, and Flickr integration), it will hook into your Facebook account and let you download not just all of your photos, but all of your friends’ photos as well. It is almost scary how easy it is to do this, and serves as an excellent example of why a picture may not be gone even if you do delete it.
PhotoGrabber
http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/
Photograbber is dead-simple. Install it, log in, and download pictures according to their tags. Want to grab every picture you’re tagged in? Click your name and it’s off to the races.
FacePad
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442/
FacePAD (Facebook Photo Album Downloader) is a Firefox plugin. Pick an album and download; simple as that.
Facedown
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/facedown/
This one is almost creepy. Facedown bills itself as being able to download any picture, in any album you have access to–even if you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see it because you are not friends with the album owner. In other words, if you had a wild night documented in a Facebook album, but only tagged a tame picture from early in the evening, it’s still possible for others to get to the entire album. Complain about privacy settings if you will, but you did agree to the Facebook terms and conditions, even if you didn’t bother to read them.
ArchiveFacebook
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13993/
This is a Firefox add-on that will not only download your photos, but also your messages, activity streams, friends list, notes, etc. Thinking of starting a new account but don’t want to lose any info? This might be the ticket.
Socialsafe
Similar to ArchiveFacebook, this tool will back up your entire Facebook for a small fee. The interface is kind of cool, and it offers a “Time Capsule” ability to review your Facebook as it changes over the years.
One thing you’ll notice is that none of these tools offers you the ability to delete your pictures easily. Sadly, the only way I have been able to discover to do that so far is to individually delete each photo or close the entire account and create a new one. If you have discovered a simple way to mass-delete photos, please let me know.
As you can see, Facebook’s photo management reputation is slanted pretty heavily: they offer many ways to collect as much your data as possible, but it becomes much more difficult to extract it once you have given it. My advice would be to be cautious about what you give in the first place.
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