Do you post all your precious images to Facebook or simply keep them on your cell phone? What happens when your account is lost or shut down? What happens when your phone is damaged, and you didn't back up to the cloud?
I have been guilty in the past of only posting images to my Facebook, not printing them or saving them elsewhere. However, ever since I started my photography journey, I have a huge external drive that I keep all of my images for clients, personal and even cell phone images that I will occasionally download from my phone and then back up on this external drive.
I am sure, however, I missed some photos before starting this process. So, I started digging after a good friend of mine had her Facebook account shut down and she lost all of her images.
Similar to the fear of our homes being destroyed by fire, as we would lose all of our precious possessions such as photos, I think this happening to her have all of us now worried about our own photos for which I am sure most of us use social media platforms to keep and store memories through the years. We just assume it will be there forever!
As a professional photographer, firstly, I feel the need to say - PRINT YOUR PHOTOS! Don't let those photos you hold dear only be on a hard drive, on Facebook, or any other digital form only. Make an album for each year for your images.
Believe me, you may not really think it is important until you lose a loved one, whether it be your family and friends, or your four-legged loved ones---photos are what we ALL go to helping us to bring back those moments in time.
If you only have a few selected albums you'd like to download, go to your photos, then click Albums. In the upper right-hand corner of each album, you will see three dots. Click and a dropdown menu will pop up. Simply click Download Album.
In a few minutes, you will get a notification on your Facebook, that your album download is ready.
Click it and your zipped file will download to your computer.
Saving a single photo is similar; open it to its full-size view, and right click on the image, then hit Save Photo. Or use the three-dot menu to find the Download button.
If you would like to know how to get a download of ALL of your content from Facebook, I found a pretty recent article on how to do that. See below:
Now get busy and make sure you print those images you simply love! Buy an album to place those prints or make an album. Make sure you have all the images you hold dear downloaded, then back them up somehow. You can do this by simply putting your folders into a dropbox, or cloud service, or an external drive. You can further backup those images with services such as Backblaze, which is what I use for all of my client images and personal images. It is subscription based, but well worth the security!