Storing all your photos in one online basket is never a good idea. If you want to migrate to another social media network or delete your profile, you'll want to ensure albums and tagged photos are backed up. Plus, since you can never be too careful with the media you entrust to social media sites, use these five online tools to download tagged photos for safekeeping.
- Social Folders [1] (free up to 2,000 files downloaded) — Sync photos from Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Google Docs, Twitter, Instagram, Picasa, and more to a folder on your desktop. Use SocialFolder to move files easily from one website to another, or send and receive files to/from your friends.
- Pick & Zip [2] (free) — Download albums, photos tagged of you, and videos from Facebook through this free software. Pick which media you'd like to back up, and the software will compress the video and images into a .zip file or .pdf.
- IFTTT Recipe [3] (free) — This won't download the photos you've already been tagged in, but it will save photos you get tagged in from here on out. Every time an image is linked to your Facebook account, IFTTT (If This Then That) will add that file to Dropbox. Think this recipe is cool? There are plenty of other nifty automated commands [4] that IFTTT can do for you.
- Move Your Photos [5] (free) — This Chrome browser extension makes migrating to Google+ easy, by exporting Facebook photos to Picasa. Share photos with any of your Google+ circles instantly from Picasa or download them to another backup source.
- PhotoLive [6] (free) — Install this browser extension into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera and download your own photos or those of friends. We like PhotoLive because the extension doesn't have any Facebook log-in buttons — the extension doesn't keep track or store any user activity.
If you're not interested in entire albums, you can always download each Facebook photo manually by opening up the image, hovering over the window, and clicking Options > Download, which will give you the highest resolution possible.