If you don’t automatically back up your photos on Google Photos just yet, you will now have an extra tool in your arsenal. Facebook has just announced that soon you will be able to backup your photos uploaded on the social network to your Google Photos account. This is part of their goal to bring data portability (that is hopefully secure) to their users through the Data Transfer Project involving other major technology brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.
Of course, you could always download your information, including photos, from Facebook any time you want. But now they want to give you the option to back them up on other platforms that are not theirs. This tool is just the first of many that they plan to introduce through the aforementioned Data Transfer Project that they have been working on together with the other tech brands. We might soon see that you could also back them up on Apple’s Photos or Microsoft’s OneDrive, etc.
The Google Photos backup tool will first be available for those in Ireland within the first half of 2020 but with no specific timeframe. You will be able to find it in the same place where you can download Your Facebook Information, in the settings section. All of the data that will be transferred will be encrypted to ensure privacy and security. You will also be asked to enter your password before the transfer can begin.
The tool is still in its early stages and Facebook says they will “continue refining it” based on feedback from beta users. If you backup your photos from your phone automatically to Facebook then this should not be of much use to you since it will probably create duplicates. But if you upload photos on Facebook from other sources aside from your phone and if you don’t back it up automatically on cloud services like Google Photos, then this will be particularly useful.
We’ll probably hear more about this as we get nearer to the official rollout. In the meantime, you can always just back up your photos by downloading them from Facebook’s tool or you can use the automatic backup on your phone for Google Photos.
