Category Archives: Facebook Tricks

Computers, Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

How to hide your likes from Facebook timeline – updated

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This post is out of date. Please go here to see the latest version of ‘The Ultimate Facebook Likes Guide – as of April 23, 2013’

TIP: Please read the words just above this. Facebook is constantly changing. Please take the link to our more recent post: This is the NOT latest way to hide your likes from your Facebook timeline. We wrote about this a few months ago but Facebook has changed since then. One of my readers pointed out that the old way of hiding your likes doesn’t work now.

TIP: The word ‘like’ here means public pages that you click ‘Like’ on in Facebook or Subscriptions that you’ve chosen. If you click ‘Like’ on some hot guy or girl’s public page, you can hide that from your timeline. Unfortunately, if you click ‘Like’ on one of the photos or videos on that same page, everyone will know about it. You can hide the pages you like but you can’t hide the fact that you ‘liked’ a photo or something else that someone has shared. Get it? The only way to hide your individual photo likes is to ‘unlike’ them. 

Here’s how you can do it as of May 2012:

1. Go to your profile page, as opposed to your HOME page. Click on your own name up on the right side of your screen.

2. Now is a good time to see what your friends can see. Click on the small arrow just to the right of Update Info/Activity Log. Click on the words View As. Your profile will load again but this time you will see these words at the top: ”

This is how your Timeline looks to the public.

Use this tool to see how your Timeline appears to a specific friend or the public. Remember: you can always change who can see any post that appears on your Timeline.”

Just below these words you’ll see a space where you can ‘Enter a friend’s name’. Pick any friend and you’ll be able to see what they can see. If there are things that you want to hide, follow these steps. Oh, keep that page open. When you make changes, hit reload on this page and you’ll see the new, updated settings as your friend sees them. Right click your name and choose ‘open in new tab’. That way you can work on one tab and check your changes in the other.

3. On the new page that you’ve opened up,  on the very top right, click on the down arrow and choose ‘Account Settings’. Once you’re at that page, look for these words on the bottom of the left column: ‘You can also visit your privacy settings or edit your Timeline to control who sees the info there.’

4. Click on the words ‘your Timeline’.

5. An editable version of your profile page will come up next, with your basic info already open. Make sure you are sharing only the things you want to share there, then close it down. Check the settings in the other areas such as Work and Education, Contact Info (do people really need to know your email address?), etc. This is where you can edit your ‘Favorite quotations’ or the ‘About you’ section, as well.

6. On the top left to the right of your name, you’ll see the word ‘About’ followed by a down arrow. This tells you that you are on the “About’ page, the arrow indicates that there is more to edit. Click on the arrow and choose Timeline. This is where we’ll hide our likes from the Facebook Timeline.

7. Once your page reloads, you’ll see your profile page again, this time with places where you can edit what you share and what you don’t. Around the middle of the page, you’ll see the words ‘Activity Log’. Click there.

8. Once you click on ‘Activity Log’, all of your current activity is shown. You can sort through these one by one, choosing to share it with some people, none or hide it from your timeline completely. The only thing you can’t stop from being shared is your ‘likes’ on photos or videos, individual items in other words. All you can do with these is to ‘unlike’ them.

9. Up on the top right, you’ll see the word ‘All’ with a down arrow to the right of it. Clicking on that will make a menu scroll down that contains all of the available activities. Here is what is looks like:

Editing your Timeline
This is where you can edit each thing you want to share.

10. Clicking on each word brings up that set of activities in its own timeline. Here you can hide each one, depending on who you want to share things with. Maybe you want to share some of the pages you like but not others. Here is where you can scroll through them and choose who sees what. Beside each Public Page or Public Figure you’ll see a small circle. Click on that circle and choose either ‘Allowed on Timeline’ or ‘Hidden from Timeline.’ You can also choose to Unlike that page which will, of course, keep it off your Timeline.

11. Sort your way through all of the activities that are presented in the menu shown above. You can hide the fact that you have befriended someone, for instance, or you can actually highlight that fact, for some reason. You can also ‘unlike’ or ‘unfriend’  from this menu. As for Subscriptions, you can hide them also. At some point in the future I will go through all of these choices one by one but, for now, see what’s here and choose what you want to share and what you want to hide.

Thanks for reading!

 

TIP: I’ve just discovered a hidden menu in Facebook. My next post will be about that. If you’re asking yourself, “Why doesn’t Facebook tell me how to hide my likes on my Timeline?”, my next post will give you the answer. Facebook does tell you how to do it. They just hide the link!

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Fotobounce, Photography, Social Networking

Fotobounce – downloading a Facebook photo album

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I’ve written about Fotobounce before. If you share photos from one social media site to another, Fotobounce is a great tool. It allows you to download complete Facebook photo albums to your computer. What you do with them after that is your business, I guess, but you really should ask for permission if you are going to share anything that isn’t your own. Here is an explanation about what Fotobounce is: Fotobounce Made Simple   (The original post wasn’t named that but it sounds good, right?)

While Fotobounce is a cool app, the actual downloading of albums can get tricky because of the way the instructions are worded. In this post I’ll try to help you figure out the odd English that they use in the selection process. Before I forget, Fotobounce is available here: http://fotobounce.com/

1. Download and install Fotobounce…duh!

2. Open the program and head over to Facebook. Sign in to Facebook with Fotobounce. You’ll have to allow it access but, according to the makers, they don’t save your password. You can always remove the access after you’ve downloaded the albums that are of interest.

3. Find the album you want to download. You have to sort through your friends, your likes and your acquaintances to find the right album(s) but that’s pretty basic.

4. Once you find the album, right click it. You’ll see the ‘Download’ button. Click it and the following menu pops up:

Choose where you want the album to be downloaded.
I've selected Events by clicking on it but I haven't started the download.

5. In this menu, you are choosing the main folder for the download. If you click ‘Select album’, Fotobounce will start the download to, in this case, Events. That’s not what I want. I want to create a sub-folder and then maybe a sub-sub-folder. Let’s do that. We’ll make a sub-folder inside of Events.

6. Click New Album. Fotobounce will show you a new album dialogue, as pictured below, and it will have the same name as the album has on Facebook. We don’t want that. We need to sort out the downloaded albums according to whose they were on Facebook, right?

Make a new album in Fotobounce
Type the new name of the album in the box and hit Enter.

 

7. Instead of Profile Pictures, I want to name my new album ‘Joe Nemechek’. (Joe and I are lookalikes to the point that I get stopped in stores. If I ever headed South and wore a NASCAR jacket then I’m sure I’d eat free wherever I went.) Type in whatever name you want and hit the Enter key. A new album will be created and Fotobounce will give you a notice at the top of the page.

8. Once you’ve found your new folder, click on it and you’ll see the same menu window come up same as before, giving you the option to Select that album or make a New album inside of it. This time you can leave the name the same, if you want. The default name is the same name as it was on Facebook.

9. If that name is fine, click on the Select Album button and Fotobounce will download the album inside of the album that you just created.

This sounds pretty simple, right? It’s not. Here’s the problem, as I see it. When I see the words ‘Select album’, I expect to get a choice. Instead of the normal ‘OK” that everyone else uses, Fotobounce uses ‘Select album’ as the button that starts the download. Unless you make a folder or a folder within a folder, Fotobounce will happily download your albums into the same directory. Good luck trying to figure that out when you’ve got more than a few albums in your collection. You have to create new albums if you are ever going to figure out which album is which. Sure, you could to all of this within Windows Explorer but it should be a one-step process or the wording should be a bit clearer. That’s what I think, anyway.

Fotobounce does a lot more than simply saving albums in Facebook. Check it out. I’ve just scratched the surface here.

Thanks for reading!

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Timeline

How to Hide Your Likes in Facebook Timeline

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PLEASE NOTE: This method is no longer valid. Please take the link to our latest update on this topic. Facebook has changed their Timeline editing system. Here is the link: 

Hiding Likes on Facebook – it’s back! 

I like many diverse things on Facebook, some of which wouldn’t fit in with some of my friend’s sensibilities. There is no reason why everything I like has to be open for my friends to see. Here’s how to hide these likes from your friends.

TIP:  This only applies to the new Timeline feature of Facebook. If you’re still on the old Facebook interface, this doesn’t apply to you.

Step One: Navigate to your own profile. Simply click on your name up on the top of your browser window, right beside the little icon which is your profile pic.

Step Two: On the far right of the word Home , you’ll see an arrow pointing down. Click it and you’ll see Account Settings. Click Account Settings to bring up General Account Settings. Basically, that’s your name, your username, email etc.

Step Three: On the left side, under the word facebook , you’ll see the words General, Security, Notifications, Apps, Mobile, Payments and Facebook Ads. Go through each of them, if you want, but what we are looking for now is the little blurb at the bottom. This is what it looks like:

Here is how you edit your timeline.
Click on ‘edit your timeline’ to bring up an editable version of your timeline.

Step Four: Click the word timeline to bring up a non-graphical version of everything on your timeline. Again, you can view these settings page by page. The initial one is  About you. You can edit and show/hide any portion of your information. How? Look for this icon:

The timeline edit menu
Click on the ‘world’ icon to change your settings.

Your icon, if you haven’t set it already, will be the globe one. Mine is the two headed friends icon. Here is where you decide what to hide from the public, from your friends or, by using the custom setting, some of your friends.

Step Five: Right beside your name on the upper left, where it says About now, click on the little down arrow to show this menu:

Different things to edit
This is where you choose what to edit.

What we’re doing now is editing the Likes part of your timeline so click it. Adjust the others according to your personal tastes.

Step Six: Once you click Likes, you’ll be presented with a rather blank page, depending on how much you like . The next step involves a hover button. A hover button is hidden unless you hover your mouse over it. Move your mouse around the Favorites section. It’s all white and you’re looking up on the top right. This is how it looks:

The hover button for Editing your Likes.
Hover your mouse in the white area to bring up the edit button.

Click the Edit button to, finally, edit your likes.

Step Seven: You’re almost there, don’t get discouraged. Clicking on the edit button in the previous step brings up an editable page for all of your likes. Clicking on the down arrow to the right of the globe icon, you can hide some, all or none of them. Down near the bottom is the  Other Pages You Like section. This is how it looks:

Edit your 'like pages' here
I’ve hidden my pages likes so only I can see them.

You’ll recognize the icon of the globe just to the right of the Other Pages You Like words. This is how you can adjust your settings according to your tastes. As you can see, I hid my page likes from everyone, except myself, of course. You can fine tune this setting to eliminate a few of your friends, too, by setting things up in the Custom section that you see fourth from the top.

There isn’t any reason that I can see to share all of the pages that I like. My tastes aren’t totally diverse from the norm but maybe I’m a rock musician and I happen to like Celine Dion’s Facebook page. How would that go over? I’m sure you can see why someone would want to cover up some of their likes. Now you know how to do it!

Thanks for reading. Questions and comments are welcome.