Download Facebook Albums

Please Note: Since we wrote this review, ‘Download FB Album mod’ has changed its settings and asks form more permissions than we feel is safe. Here are the permissions it is asking for now: 

Photo of FB Album permissions.
Too many permission for a Facebook downloading app.

There is no reason why this extension has to access ALL of your data on websites, that would include passwords, by the way. Nor is there any reason for it to access your other tabs or browsing activity. It seems that the creators are involved in data mining, selling your information to advertisers, etc. Beware! We’re going back to Fotobounce. 

If you want to download whole photo albums on Facebook, you don’t have too many choices. The old ways, Fotobounce and others, only work sometimes, if at all now. We’ve discovered a brand new system that will download whole albums quickly and easily. Yay us! Here’s the scoop:

1. You have to be using Google Chrome as a browser. We suggest Chrome should be your default browser anyway so go to Google and download it, it you aren’t using it now.

TIP: When you are downloading software, make sure you go to the source. We’ve noticed that fake Chrome sites exist. We can only assume that these sites will install a modified version of Chrome, probably filled with some kind of malware. Go to google.com and take the link from there.

2. Once Chrome is installed, head over to the Google Web Store, everything is free so don’t worry about the word ‘store’. What you’re going to do is install an extension, a little bit of software that is added to Chrome which will download full Facebook photo albums. Here’s the link: Google Web Store

3. What you’re looking for is: Download FB Album Mod. This is an ‘extension’, not an app. Here are a couple of links to the download page for this extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/download-fb-album-mod/cgjnhhjpfcdhbhlcmmjppicjmgfkppok?hl=en

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search-extensions/Download%20FB%20Album%20mod?hl=en

4. Download and install the mod. You don’t have to reboot your computer or even restart Chrome.

5. Now for the fun part. Head over to Facebook and find an album that you want to save. Here is the process in pictures:

Photo of Facebook Album  1
Up on the top right of your URL bar, look for this symbol. Click it.

TIP: Please note that this icon only appears when you are on a Facebook page.

6. After you click the icon, this menu appears:

Photo of Facebook Album  2
Choose Normal. You can also choose to download the captions with each photo.

 

7. A new tab opens when you click Normal. The album will load on that page and a message will be shown at  the top. It flashes on and off so be prepared to read it. Here it is:

Photo of Facebook Album  3
Use the CTRL + s keys to save the album to your computer.

 

8. The save menu comes up next. It will give the name of the album and save it as an htm file, in other words as a complete web page. Click OK to save the file.

Saved as a Web Page, an htm file.
Saved as a Web Page, an htm file.

9. Once the file is saved, and for a large album this could take a while, head over to your download folder. The photos will be in a folder, as opposed to a single set of files, so look for the folder icon with the correct name.

Photo of Facebook Album  5
Look for the folder icon with the name of the album you just saved.

 

10. Double click on the folder. Inside that folder will be all of the photos in the album. You’re done!

Photo of Facebook Album  7
Here are the photos in this album.

 

As of February 5th, 2013, this system works. None of the others ways that we have written about in previous posts seem to work now. Why? Probably because of new privacy settings that Facebook is using. Fotobounce will still work with some albums but it’s much more difficult to use and it still stops working on large albums. This system, using Download FB Album Mod, works perfectly. Let us know if you have a problem with it.

Thanks for reading

NOTE: For this post we used https://www.facebook.com/Riddlesmessywardrobe  page. Riddle is one of our favorite cosplay stars. Stop by and like her page.

 

 

 

 

 

75 thoughts on “Download Facebook Albums”

      1. Hello, thanks for your work, it saves me tons of time.

        But with new FB design I have the Cannot load required variable, refresh page to retry? error.

  1. When I choose the “Normal” option and it asks to use captions, regardless of whether I choose OK or Cancel, I get an error message that says “Cannot load required variable, refresh page to retry?”.

    If I click OK for that, it just refreses the page and I have to start over. If I click Cancel, the Ctrl+S screen with images of all the photos in the album comes up, but the images are all 200×200 versions of the real images and those are what get saved to my desktop if I do the Ctrl+S Complete route.

    I have tried this on multiple albums from multiple different facebook users, same results. Running the most up to date Chrome.

    Any ideas? Thank you very much for your assistance!

    1. Download Album still works for us, no problem. Normal, click Captions OK then the next page loads after a bit of time, hit Ctrl/S and save the album. We’re not sure what’s happening in your case. Is it always the same album? Does it work on some albums but not others? There are quite a few variables including the amount of RAM you have and what other programs you are running. Streamline it all to one tab, one program open and check again. If it works on some pages but not others, then the problem might be in the privacy settings of the album you are trying to download. If it’s a page, send the link in a comment. We won’t publish it but we will try to d/l it. Thanks for commenting.

    1. If you can figure out how to work 4chan, you can probably figure out whether this will work or not. Chrome extensions work for Chrome. You’ll have to check the FF extension page. Good luck. Thanks for commenting.

  2. is it possible to download them without viewing the page?
    When I open the the page with the album in google chrome where the photos are, in task manager the memory usage is raising over 1 million K and that is causing my whole browser to stop working… and I can’t download them…
    I want to download pinterest boards (yeah because I can view all these many photos).

    1. The photos have to be in your current memory, your RAM or your cache. If you don’t load the whole page, you won’t get all the photos. Shut down everything else then try again. Good luck and thanks for commenting.

    1. It’s all explained in the post. Install the extension, read the post and follow the instructions. Thanks for commenting.

  3. Guys, Im facing a problem which my google chrome always fail to download or get the FB DownAlbum extension add on… some comment on the reviews were saying that the new version of that extension already cant work as before.
    anyway, please advice me how to get my friend album photo.

    thanks,
    Young

    1. We don’t use FBDA now, having moved on to DownAlbum. It works for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media sites. Works fine for us. Good luck and thanks for commenting.

      1. Since you’re now using DownAlbum could you please write a tutorial for that extension? Please, please please. I downloaded it but the button never shows up on the album page I’m trying to download. I feel like I must be doing something wrong.

  4. Hi, I’m not sure that i ‘m having problem with the app or with facebook it self as i tried to download an entire 13k photos of a page’s timeline album but the app always load to 9348 photos, i’m guessing that facebook isn’t allowing me to load more than that as when a new photo was posted, the first image (that i click to the left of the newest one) will be a different one ; maybe it eliminate the older ones to keep the 9348 amount of photos. If i was right and this is a faecbook’s problem, is there any solution for this ? as missing nearly 4k pictures really bugging me. thanks

    1. There is a limit to how many photos you can download with this app. If you got over 9,000, consider yourself lucky. There was a comment/suggestion about this on the creator’s Facebook site but we can’t find it now. The number of photos mentioned there was substantially less than the number you managed to download. There’s no way around this, unfortunately. If there was a setting to reverse the order of the images, that might help. We’ve been playing with the app to see if we can save the captions but so far, that’s not working. Check out the apps Facebook page and see if there’s anything there. If not, ask the developer. Maybe you can find a solution. If you do, please let us know by commenting again. Thanks!

    2. We spent some time just now checking this out using Chrome. We can’t get the ID part to work but we did manage to get about 700 photos out of a 5500 photo Timeline album. What we found is that this is probably a function of how much RAM you have in your computer. We clicked on the album and the photos started to load. We scrolled down a bit and more photos loaded. At that point we wanted to see if FB Mod would find all the photos. It didn’t. First time, only 225 loaded. On the next try, we scrolled down and down several times. When we activated FB Mod, we got 700 photos. At this point we assume that you have to load the complete album, all 13,000 photos on one browser page, in order to save them all. This probably won’t work, however, because you would be limited by the amount of RAM in your computer. Maybe if you had 16 or 32 gigs of RAM this would work. No way it would with only 4 or 8. If you didn’t load the page to 9,000 images on one browser page, please let us know what steps you took to get that many. Did you keep scrolling? We’d like to solve this so let us know. Thanks!

      1. I’m not entirely sure but what i did was using the PHOTOS TAB {/photos_stream} tab; Not form the timeline or form albums tabs as when i tried to open the 13k album my computer wasn’t load any photos (it still show the FB page but none photos appear, at least for the 13k and 18k albums; 6k albums still load {i guess it still about the RAM problem as i only have 4gb ram, intel core i7})
        -I tried 3 times with the 13k albums; 1st time i manually scroll down to the end and use the app : 9348 photos were loaded, 1st and last photos in the album were match on the app
        -2nd and 3rd tried i DID NOT scroll down, still 9348 photos but as you know, they posted new photos so 1st and last photos were changed, but they still matched
        -I also test the 18k album (not scroll) it load 9675 photos ( i guess the app or my PC only load to around 9k if that is a 10k+ album)
        – 6k album : *open form album tab*; load 6437 out of 6528 photos {2 tries}, only load around 3k out of 6528 (this i ve no idea why)
        *open form photos tab* (/photos_stream); load 8873 Photos (i guess it combine all albums) 1st and last photos were matched.

        I can only show you this for now as I admit my computer is quite weak and this is time consuming and confusing. Also what i wrote here may not be accurate form my memory and other factors may varies. However don’t waste time for my case cause i am one of the very few people that tried to download 10k+ photos form FB. On other sites I use patch downloader so, anyway thank you for reply. I’ll contact if i have new info.

  5. I’ve just used this extension and the result is page without images… I’ve found the images downloaded in the HTM folder, but the .htm file seems not to be locally linked right…

    1. We’ll try this app again and see what we come up with. Once we do that, we’ll post another answer to your question. Thanks for commenting.

  6. Hi, I’ve used the extension and works fine. But it seems to me that the pictures you download are not really located on your computer? If I open the folder containing the pictures the sizes of the jpegs are really small (some hundred KB per picture). So do they just refer to a location on the internet or how does that work?

    1. The photos are on your computer. You can choose to load the thumbnails or not, that’s what you’re seeing when you say they are really small. We haven’t used this program in a long time but we know the photos are there, we’re just not sure exactly where. Try this: Open file explorer and click on your C drive then search it for the name of the album you saved from Facebook. That could be a person’s name or some description of the album itself. Once that comes up, you’ll see a folder with all the photos in it. Good luck and thanks for commenting. If you can’t find the photos, let us know and we’ll install the app again.

  7. Awesome extension to download photos with single click. But another extension should be develop to download videos with single click.

    1. There are many extensions that do that. Just add the correct extension to your browser. Some don’t work with Youtube but you can always use offliberty.com for those. Each extension works differently but we’ve been able to save just about every video we can find out there. Good luck and thanks for commenting.

  8. *** For Mac users… ***

    To get this extension to work, Mac users should use
    “Command +S” instead of “CTRL+S”

    …yer welcome 😉

    Cheers!

  9. Great tool and even better that you took the time to warn your readers of the privacy concerns with this plug-in, thank you!

    1. Thanks. We’re not sure if that was a legitimate comment or an attempt to get your site linked. Your site has no place for links to other sites like ours so we removed the link you placed in your comment. Thanks for commenting anyway.

  10. Thankyou so much for the review. 🙂 But im confused what to use now to download the album . I need to download the stuff for exams!!
    Permission says : ” Read and change all the data on the websites you visit”

    1. We think that ‘change’ is part of the downloading process. The app has to take the photos from the albums and put them onto your computer, perhaps with different dimensions. The app has to read the page data, that’s obvious, but the makers also say that you can disable it after you download the albums you want. We questioned their new terms of service and that was the answer we got. Install the app, get the albums you want then disable the app or remove it completely. Good luck and thanks for commenting.

  11. Hi Brian! You can also use odrive to download all your Facebook albums. It automatically downloads all your photos, albums and even tagged photos of you onto your computer. It’s super easy…

    1. Hi Julia. Thanks for letting us know about your product/app. We removed the links but we might give the app a try soon. If it works as you say it does, we’ll do a review of it. Right now, Facebook users can get their albums by downloading their data, somewhat cumbersome, but without adding software and letting that software see everything you’ve done on Facebook. We tell our readers to be careful about third party apps that they allow into their Facebook realm. Once we find out what your product needs in order to function, we’ll decide if we would recommend it to our readers. Thanks for the information and thanks for commenting.

      1. Hi Brian,

        No problem. I understand the concern that some users may have with 3rd party applications and granting access to their data. With odrive, we do not copy or store any of the user files (since we’re not storage app, and our business model does not rely on distributing any user information whatsoever). When a user grants odrive permission it is strictly to allow the app to download their photos onto their computer for them, and all data is transferred via secure https from the original source (Facebook) directly to the user.

        If there are any other questions please let me know. We’d love for you guys to review odrive.

        Thanks!

        1. We downloaded it today, running some things through it so a review, such as it is, will be out this week. Thanks for keeping us in the loop on your new product. At the moment, we can’t understand why you’ve added Dropbox to your list of apps that can be synced. Dropbox syncs itself, very efficiently. Why would someone need to sync an app that syncs itself? Same for OneDrive. This kind of thing makes us wonder about the real reason behind your product. You are asking users to give you access to simple apps such as Facebook but you also offer to sync programs that potentially contain very private information AND that sync themselves. Why? Once you have the user’s passwords, you can access their Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, etc. For a new, unknown service, this seems to be asking for enormous amounts of trust. Facebook photo albums are innocuous, cloud storage folders aren’t. Cloud users should be very careful about who they share their passwords with, for very good reason. Your FAQ does not mention how you protect the passwords/usernames that you cull. How secure are they? Dropbox guarantees their security system but, as we all know, they are frequently hacked. This is pretty much what we’re going to tell our readers in the review, just so you know. We’d love to hear your response to our questions. Thanks again for commenting.

          1. Hi Brian,

            I posted a reply earlier but wasn’t sure if that was saved correctly so I’m going to repeat it one more time here just in case. if this happens to be a duplicate comment then feel free to delete it.

            I want to make sure I address all the questions you guys have about odrive.

            It is true that Dropbox and some of the other apps we support do already have sync as a feature. One of the key benefits of odrive is to bring together all the different services you may use to simplify how you can access your data that is scattered everywhere. Many users use more than just one app or storage service. Or some users have multiple accounts on Dropbox or Google Drive – where one may be personal and another could be for work. With odrive, we can bring together all your apps and all your accounts so it is easier to get to all your files from the same place. With a direct file system integration it is now easier to manage all your content without having to log in and out or different accounts, or run multiple apps just to find the files you need.

            Also another key is in our progressive sync technology. We designed it to sync lots of content in a faster and more seamless way. With progressive sync, we only sync the files and folders that you want, instead of downloading all of your content at once. This reduces bandwidth consumption and makes it much faster to access for users that have a huge amount of stuff in their accounts. Dropbox does provide selective sync but it is something that you have ton configure. Progressive sync makes the experience more intuitive and automative so there is no configuration needed. And if you no longer want the files on your computer? You can easily unsync with one-click so the files will be removed from your computer’s hard drive but still safely stored in its original app storage location. This gives a user more flexibility to manage their own hard drive utilization without having to delete their files.

            As for privacy – odrive does not see your passwords at all. We’re in the process of updating our FAQ to provide more clarification.

            When you use odrive to access other apps such as Dropbox, you are authenticating directly against the 3rd part service, and it does not go through us at all meaning we cannot see your password and do not have access to your content. odrive therefore cannot and does not copy or store any of your data either.

            The odrive client always communicates directly with linked 3rd party providers and employs transport encryption for every interaction with said 3rd parties. This means that all communication, including data transfer, is encrypted on your local machine prior to its direct transit to the linked destination. For example, if you are using odrive to link to Dropbox, any files copied into the odrive folder associated with your Dropbox account will be encrypted by the client and immediately sent directly to Dropbox’s servers. At no point is any portion of that data sent anywhere else but to Dropbox. This same process happens for all 3rd party sources that the odrive client links to.

            Hope this helps and sorry if this is a duplicate entry. Please let me know if there are any other questions about odrive!

          2. Thanks Julia. Our review, such as it is, came out today, October 20th, 2014. Check it for inaccuracies, let us know if you disagree with anything in it. Our readers are not usually business or IT people. They’re just everyday folks who come to us for tips on Facebook, WeChat, etc. For that, odrive is just fine as far as we’re concerned. We’re still leery about giving access to third party apps, that’s something we warn our readers about all the time. Thanks again for letting us know about your product and company. If you come out with other offerings, please keep us informed.

  12. Well, what can I say but thank you! A group of us had uploaded photos and I needed a way of downloading them all and this did the job. Thanks!

    1. Up on the very top right side of your Chrome window, look for the three short horizontal lines. Click on them. A menu will come down. Slide your mouse/cursor down to Tools. Another menu will pop out to the side. Click on Extensions. On the page that comes up, look for the extension you want to remove. You can either trash it by clicking on the icon of the trashcan or simply disable it. If you disable it, you can still use it when you want by enabling it. Let us know if you have a problem with this. Thanks for commenting.

  13. Nothing happens after clicking Normal except that it closes the FB Album mod popup. The only thing that does open a new tab is View All Downloaded Albums which of course is empty as I can’t get the darn thing to work

    1. It works for us, we just tried it. We’ll do an update on it but for now, make sure you have the latest version. Go to any album, even if you are just following that person, open the album and click on the FB Album icon up on the top right. Click on normal and wait for a moment or two, then a new page opens up with large thumbnails of all the photos. At that point, click on the three hash marks up on the top right of Chrome and choose ‘Save page as’, accept the default name and the page is then downloaded, complete with all the photos. The page itself is irrelevant, what you are looking for is the folder that holds the photos. That folder will have the same name as the page itself. If this doesn’t work, we think something is blocking FB Album somehow. It’s not the mod, it’s something else. Good luck!

    2. I just used this app after trying several others that didn’t work, this one worked just perfectly. Thank you.

  14. Regarding the Permissions, it seems a lot of extensions have it set that way, I wouldn’t worry. To prevent an extention from capturing data, just disable it and use it only when needed, it’s not like people download albums all day.

  15. I’ve downloaded an album. I’ve chosen “load captions” but where are the captions? I can’t find it once I’ve downloaded the photos..

    1. We’ve tried the same procedure and we can’t find the captions either. We’ve posted a question on their site and we’ll let you know when we get an answer. Heed the warning on our post though. This app is asking for many more permissions than it should. Your surfing information is all doing back to them, not a good idea. Thanks for commenting!

  16. Once an album is downloaded and save can it be easily uploaded to another apge/group with the captions included?

    1. Actually, we don’t recommend this software now. The settings have been changed and this app is asking for far too many permissions for us to accept using it. Check your permissions. This app will now access all of your tabs, all of your browsing, everything you do. That’s simply not acceptable. To answer your question, yes you can download the photos with the captions. There is a setting for that.
      Thanks for commenting!

      1. Lol that’s not what I asked. I wanted to know if I could upload it again to another facebook album with the captions included. Is there something else you could recommend for this?

        1. You’d have to copy and paste the captions. There is no way to automatically include them when you are uploading the album(s). At this point, we’re going back to Fotobounce, despite its limitations.

    1. In the folder where you save things that you download, usually ‘Downloads’, there are two pieces to every HTM file that you save. One is the actual HTM file that opens exactly like a webpage, complete with photos. The other is a folder with the same name as the HTM file but with _files after the name, for instance ‘Home Design-Timeline Photos_files’. Inside that folder are all of the JPG files that you are looking for. We will do a complete post on this in the next few days. Thanks for the idea.
      And thanks for commenting!

  17. this tutorial covers only the basic features of this extension. what about the advanced features? can u extend this post to cover those too? thanks in advance 🙂

    1. There are no advanced features for this software. It just does what it says it can do. We’re not sure what you meant with your comment.

        1. To be honest, we’re not sure how they work. Our explanation in this post seems to be about as simple as possible. We’ve seen other reviews and videos that make the process very complicated. We’re don’t do ‘complicated’. Our aim is to make difficult things simpler, not more complicated. Saving the photos to a zip file, for instance, is useless. The photos are already jpegs and can’t be compressed much more than they are. Additionally, a zip file is not simple computing. Opening a folder full of photos is simple. You wouldn’t be the apps creator, would you? This post is mentioned and linked from the Chrome store on the description of this tool. That was nice!

        2. I’m the extension creator. Thanks for your support~ Which function’s detail you want to know more?

          Feel free to leave comments in the fb/extension page or send email to [gmail: indreamhk].

          1. Basically, we’d like to know what ‘Without Auto Load’ and ‘Load from a Specific ID’ mean. We’ve explained ‘Normal’ and that’s the one we recommend but we can’t see any change when we use the other options. Also, what would ‘Compress Data’ do? Will that create a zip file? If we are downloading Jpeg files, what further compression is possible?
            Thanks! We’ll do another review when we get more details. Your app works perfectly so far. Congratulations!

          2. I’ve updated the description in extension page, and details for each options are explained.

          3. OK, thanks. We’ll take a look and do another post on it this week.

            Thanks for commenting! Good luck with the app.

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