Facebook Privacy: Are Your Photos Private?
May 19, 2008
I loooove Facebook. And so do many of my friends! In our photo albums, we post photos of our kids, of ourselves (whether it be sunnying ourselves at the beach or something a bit more decent), of our friends, even of our pets doing stupid tricks or just looking cute (come to think of it, so do the photos of our kids).
What many people don’t realize is that each photo album has its own privacy setting. When you first create a photo album — whether it’s your first or 10th — its privacy level is automatically set to “Everyone.” That means everyone can see it. You can choose from several privacy levels: Everyone, My Network and Friends, Only people at your network, Friends of Friends, or Only Friends. You can even customize who can and can’t see these photos. See screenshot below of the page that appears when you create a photo album:
If you only want your Friends to see these photos, then be sure to select “Only Friends.” Otherwise, everyone and their hairdressers would be able to see YOUR photos even if you’ve got the rest of your profile restricted to Friends only.
You can go back and check the privacy setting of all of your albums all at once via Facebook’s Photos Privacy page. Here, you’ll see a list of all of your photo albums with the option of changing the privacy level of each of these albums. Too bad there’s no option to change all of the albums at once — so if you’ve got 20 albums, it’ll be tedious changing each one individually. Be sure to click on “Save Settings” at the bottom of the page once you’ve changed the privacy setting(s)! Here’s a screenshot of what this page looks like.
So, go forth and have fun on Facebook, and be careful with your privacy!
This is part of an on-going series of posts on Facebook privacy. See related posts on photo albums, profile page, and search options.
May 19, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Thank you! I didn’t realize that. I just edited them recently.
May 20, 2008 at 10:31 am
Hi Josh! It’s Wendy (Sunny) … I see pros to privacy settings for each album. There are some albums I may not want everyone or even specific people to see while other albums, I am alright with more eyes looking at. It does become a headache if you have a lot of albums. Is there a solution to this? :)
*shaking head* Us and our high tech expectations… which is GOOD!! Lol.
Wendy
June 13, 2008 at 5:41 am
hi…maybe you can help me with a problem. i’ve got all my albums on ‘friends only’ and when i tag a friend his friends can’t see the tagged pic even.
but if i switch it to ‘everyone’ or ‘friends of friends’ these friends of friends can now see my ENTIRE album!
is there some setting which allows friends of friends to see the tagged pic ONLY and not the rest of the album?
June 29, 2008 at 1:32 am
Hi! I just wandered if you know something weird that happens with a friend I have. His profile says he has 44 photos, but when I get into his photos’ page, I can only see 22 of them. Do you know why?
June 29, 2008 at 7:40 am
Pepe and Sub - I’m afraid I don’t know the answers to your questions. :-(
July 16, 2008 at 8:44 am
PG: no worries. thanks anyway :)
Pepe: if you look carefully your problem is the inverse of mine :)
this happens because someone like me has tagged your friend but marked the album security to ‘friends only’. so those 22 pics won’t be visible to you unless you are also friends with the owner of those albums.
subu
July 30, 2008 at 12:36 pm
thanks. I forgot this part, and remembered the whole edit application-> photos etc