If you’ve been thinking about leaving Facebook for some time now or at least backing up your photos from the platform, the photo transfer tool that they introduced earlier this year is now available for all users globally. This means you will be able to seamlessly back up all the photos that you uploaded on your Facebook account to Google Photos. Initially, it was only available for users in Europe but now the global rollout is finally complete and so you can start finalizing plans to leave or just to have your photos stored elsewhere.
A few months ago, the only way you could back up your photos from Facebook to another photo service was to manually download then upload them. Yes, you could actually download copies of a lot of information that you uploaded on Facebook (including photos) but after you get your data, there was little else you could do with it other than just having a copy of all your Facebook data.
But then Facebook introduced their photo transfer tool which just takes a few relatively painless steps to transfer said photos to Google Photos. You can go to your Facebook information settings menu and select the “Transfer a copy of your photos or videos” and click view to start. You will have to enter your Facebook password in order to verify your identity. Then you will have to choose Google Photos as the destination.
You also need to enter your Google Photos password of course to confirm the transfer. Now all you have to do is wait for the notification and the email once the transfer is complete. Facebook says they will be adding other photo apps soon, in case Google Photos is not the service that you want to backup your photos and videos. They will need for collaborating developers to build the photos API of course.
This move is part of the Data Transfer Project involving Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech giants. Facebook says the photo transfer tool is now available for everyone so you should be able to see it in your account.
