Category Archives: Facebook

Custom Facebook Privacy Settings – Part 1



If you want to post something on Facebook but you don’t want all of your friends to see it, here’s what you have to do.

1. First, you need a list. Facebook allows you to create lists of your friends very easily. You can use these lists for privacy, which is what we’ll do here, or to sort out your newsfeed/friend updates. If you only want to see updates from a certain group of people, you have to make a list first.

2. Go to your own timeline, click on the box that says ‘Friends’ to bring up a list of all of your friends.

3. On your list of friends, this is a typical pop-out when you hover your cursor over a name.

Photo showing how to Create a List 1
Pick a friend who you want to add to a list.

4. See the word ‘Friends’ in the photo above? Hover over that until you see this menu:

Photo of how to Create a List 2
Hover on the word Friends to bring up this menu. Look for ‘Show all lists’

 

5. When you hover your cursor over ‘Show all lists’, the following menu will show up. This will allow you to create a new list for this friend. If you already have some lists, simply click on the list and that friend will be added to whatever list you choose.

Photo of how to Create a List 3
Down at the bottom, you’ll see ‘+ new list’. Click that.

 

6. When you click ‘+ New list’, you’ll see a small rectangle which will allow you to name the new list.

Photo of how to Create a List 4
Name your list and your friend is automatically on that list.

 

7. Now you have one list. Add friends to it by hovering your cursor over their name and clicking any list that you want them to be on. Makes sense, right?

 

OK, now you have one or more lists. Once you sort your friends into these lists, you can then move on to post things that only they will see. That’s in part two of this instructional. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Facebook Data Download – What to do with it after you get it



In our last post, we described how to download your Facebook data file. If you’re leaving Facebook, make sure you download your history, but even if you’re staying around, it’s interesting to see what’s in the download. Here’s how to check out your data download once you get it.

1. Download your Facebook data. Here’s the instructions for that: Facebook Data Download

2. Once you get the email that your file is ready, click on the link in the email, enter your password on the Facebook page that opens from the link (you have to enter your password even if you are already signed in to Facebook in another tab) and click the button to start the download.

3. The download is a zip file. On the profile that we used, the data download was 666 MB in size. Yours will vary from that, of course.

4. A zip file, in case you didn’t know, is compressed. It’s like buying something in a bubble pack. You have to spend a bit of time unzipping the file in order to see the data that’s in it. No worries. Windows knows how to handle the file. Find the file on your computer and right click it. This is what you’ll see:

Photo of Unzip Menu
Choose ‘Extract all’

 

5. The extraction of the zip file creates a folder. Double click that folder to get to yet another folder, named for the Facebook profile you downloaded. Double click that folder to get to this:

Photo of Folder Contents
The Facebook data is turned into one web page. Double click the index.html file.

 

6. Everything from the data file is available from the index.html page. Double click it and it will open in your default web browser. Here’s what you’ll see:

Photo of Facebook Data Download Web Page
It’s all here. Click on the items on the left side to see them on the right.

 

That’s it! The page is very plain, as you will see, but your data is all there…perhaps. The messages seem to be a bit sketchy, from what we’ve seen. Some are there, some are marked ‘unknown’, etc. The problem may be due to the fact that some of your friends have left Facebook or maybe they aren’t your friends now, something like that.

This should all be straightforward but if you have questions, just comment below and we’ll work it out for you.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Facebook Data Download – How to do it



Before you leave Facebook, make sure you download a copy of your Facebook history. Many people leave Facebook every day. Sure, more people join Facebook than leave it but the word is that many of us are concerned about our privacy as Facebook ramps up to make more money for its investors.  Here’s how to save your Facebook history:

1. Navigate to your Account Settings (click the down arrow to the right of the word ‘Home’ from any page in Facebook and choose Account Settings.)

2. This is what you want to see:

Photo of Facebook Data download 1
Click on ‘Download a copy’ to get to the next screen.

 

3.

Photo of Data Download menu
Click on the green ‘Start My Archive’

 

4.

Photo of Data Download Menu 3
A little blurb pops up. Read it and click the green ‘Start my archive’ button again.

 

5.

Photo of Data Download Menu
Facebook sends you an email so click Confirm to start the process.

 

6.

Photo of Data Download Menu
You can watch the process here or just wait for the email. Depending on the amount of your involvement in Facebook, this could take a long time.

 

You’re done! Just wait for the email and download the zip file when it’s ready. Here are a couple of tips for you, just so you don’t get too excited about the whole thing:

Tip 1: The file may or may not include everything that you have posted or messaged on Facebook. One of our data downloads didn’t include all of the private messages, for instance. The photos were there, the notes too but not all of the messages.

Tip 2: Photos in which you’ve been tagged will not be included in the data download unless they are your photos. The data download is your data, not someone else’s. Don’t expect the tagged photos to be part of the download.

Once you get the zip file, right click it and Windows will unzip if for you when you choose ‘extract all’. Then you can go back through your Facebook life and reminisce.

Thanks for reading!

Download Tagged Photos in Facebook – Part 2



If you’re trying to download your tagged photos from Facebook, fbDownloader might work but, so far anyway, it won’t work for us. If you’ve read our previous posts, you’ll know that we’re trying to perform a relatively simple task. As more people are leaving Facebook, they want to take photos in which they’ve been tagged, with them. (We’re not sure why that is, really, because the tags don’t work unless the photo is in Facebook.)

In our last post, we suggested that the Facebook data download might include the tagged photos but it doesn’t. Even the advanced data download, which we haven’t been able to find yet, doesn’t include tagged photos.

fbDownload (we won’t include a link until or unless we get it working), hypes itself as being able to download all of your tagged photos. While the download is free, this big, glossy app is full of adware which you have to uncheck from its default installation. Even then, three links appeared on our desktop leading to ‘free clipart’ (who uses clipart anymore?) and a couple of other ‘free’ offers. Trust us, none of this stuff is free or, if it is, it’s full of ads and could, potentially, slow down your computer significantly.

We’ve emailed and tweeted the people at fbDownloader and we’ll update this post if we get a suitable response. If we can get this app working, and we hope we can, we’ll edit this post to reflect that.

Finally, getting the tagged photos from Facebook involves more than a few technical problems. First, any app that works inside of Facebook has to comply to Facebook’s rules. Second, the tagged photos are usually in many different places. Very few of them would be in your own profile, right? Why would you tag yourself? Each photo has its own privacy settings, depending on whose profile it’s on. We’re not saying it’s easy to download your tagged photos but we take offence when a program says it can do something that it can’t. Even if the program is free, that’s false advertising, in our opinion.

Thanks for reading!

Photo of fbDownloader
Don’t believe the hype. It doesn’t work.

How to Save Tagged Photos in Facebook



We’ve written about Fotobounce before, here and here plus more. One of our readers asked a very good question regarding Fotobounce, “How do I download the photos that I have been tagged in?” Fotobounce seemed like the place to start, so we fired it up and navigated to our own albums. Up at the top, there is a tab that reads ‘Photos of me’, like this:

Photo of Facebook Tagged Photos menu in Fotobounce
Photos of me is the tab you want.

We were dismayed to see that this tab showed some of the photos the user had been tagged in but not all of them. This user had 156 tagged photos but only 34 showed up in Fotobounce. Hmmmmm…what to do? The problem wasn’t that some of the photos were old ones since the oldest tagged photo was there. We think it might have to do with the original poster’s privacy settings but we’re not sure.

Next we tried a program named Photograbber. Photograbber is free, easy to use but, alas, it didn’t work either. We downloaded the tagged photos but, again, we only got 34 of them, not the full 156. Even though Photograbber says that it will download tagged photos, it won’t download all of them. We’re not going to plug a program that doesn’t do what it advertises on Computers Made Simple so, no link here.

Right now, we’re waiting for our Facebook data download to be prepared. We’re going to check it to see if the tagged photos are in it. If not, it looks like you’ll have to download the photos one by one. That’s a pain but it’s pretty fast. You can click your way through quite a few of them fairly quickly. Just click Options when the photo is on your screen and choose download. That’s pretty fast, all in all.

We’re going to do a post on downloading your Facebook data tomorrow. By then, we will know if the tagged photos are in it or not. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.