Updated Facebook Tip: Organizing, Moving and Editing Your Photos And Albums

We all love to post photos on Facebook, right? The challenge is that while positing photos is easy to do from your phone or tablet, organizing them into albums within Facebook can be a real pain-in-the-you-know-what. It seems that the Facebook User Experience Engineers have designed an organization system that seems logical to them, but in real life isn’t really intuitive to most of us.

A while back, I wrote a post about uploading and organizing your photos on Facebook. As Facebook made changes, I tried to keep it updated with the slight UI changes to the albums and photo organizers. As I went to update for the umpteenth time…I realized that it would probably be better to just start a new post and give the most recent instructions without all the history. Likely, I’ll have to update this one 15 times, too…but that’s the world of Facebook, right?

So if you’re just looking for tips on how to organize your photos, here are the most recent instructions.

Creating a Facebook Album (also known as uploading a photo)

The first step in getting organized is making sure you have the right albums. Facebook doesn’t let you create albums on-the-fly while you’re organizing them, so the best thing to do is go through all your current folders and see if there are some logical groups. Make a list. Yes…with a pencil and paper. For me, the groups are basically family photos, pictures of good things to eat, critters who have visited my house, cute pet photos and cupcakes. Yes…I’m a bit of a cupcake fanatic so they get their own albums.

To create a new album just go into the Albums section of your photo gallery and then click “Create New Album”.

Facebook doesn’t provide an intuitive way to create an empty album (there is a way, but it ‘s strange), so it’s best to upload a photo into the new album. Don’t worry…you can delete it later if you don’t want to keep the photo in the album.

Once the photo is selected, give your album a new name and describe the types of photos that people can expect to see in the album when they browse it. If the album contains photos that were all taken in the same location (e.g. Hawaii or New York City) you can also add a location.

Just before you click the “Post Photos” button in the lower-right corner, be sure to set your privacy settings by clicking the gear icon and choose who can see the photos in the album. Remember, this privacy setting will be set for all the photos you are uploading.

Once you click the “Post Photos” button, the new folder will be created and you’ll be able to move other photos into this album.

Moving Photos Between Albums

As I mentioned, moving photos between albums isn’t very intuitive. For me, I would just go to the individual photo, choose to edit it and expect that I can move the photo to another album from there. But this isn’t how it works. In the image below, you’ll see that the drop-down menu for editing a photo doesn’t include a link to “Move To Another Album”. Soooo…we’ll have to determine a different way to accomplish this.

To move a photo from one album to another, you don’t edit the photo….you edit the album where the photo currently exists. I know, not very logical but hey…Facebook never asked me.

To edit an album (and eventually move a photo):

1) First, decide on which album you want to move the existing photo from. You can see the full listing of your current albums by choosing the “Albums” section at the top of your photo gallery.

2) Next, click the album where the image currently resides. In my case, I am moving an image out of the “Mobile Uploads” album and into a new one I have created.

3) Click the “Edit Album” link which will give you a tiled view of the photos in the selected album, giving you more control over the album and the ability to move photos.

4) Find the photo you want to move and locate the  small drop-down image in the upper-right corner. Click that and choose “Move To Another Album”

5) Select the new album and then click “Move Photo” and you should be all set!

Deleting Photos From An Album

But what if a photo is just too embarrassing or isn’t something you want posted on Facebook anymore? You can delete a photo by locating the photo, clicking the dropdown menu on the upper-right corner and selecting “Delete This Photo”. Facebook will ask you to confirm, and then once you delete it…it’s gone from your albums. Keep in mind, however, that it may not be gone from Facebook forever, though.

According to their terms of use the types of information Facebook collects from/about you is not limited to just your status updates, but also includes the photos  you upload:

Information we receive about you

We receive a number of different types of information about you, including:

Your information
Your information is the information that’s required when you sign up for the site, as well as the information you choose to share.

• Registration information: When you sign up for Facebook, you are required to provide information such as your name, email address, birthday, and gender. In some cases, you may be able to register using other information, like your telephone number.

• Information you choose to share: Your information also includes the information you choose to share on Facebook, such as when you post a status update, upload a photo, or comment on a friend’s story.

This might seem silly to mention, but you’ll understand where I’m going with this when you read what you agree to allow Facebook to do with that information once you upload it to the site. In the “How we use the information we receive:” section of their Terms of Use, Facebook states:

Granting us this permission not only allows us to provide Facebook as it exists today, but it also allows us to provide you with innovative features and services we develop in the future that use the information we receive about you in new ways.

While you are allowing us to use the information we receive about you, you always own all of your information. Your trust is important to us, which is why we don’t share information we receive about you with others unless we have:

• received your permission;
• given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this policy; or
• removed your name or any other personally identifying information from it.

So, while this sounds all well and good, what Facebook is saying is that once you upload a photo to Facebook, it is theirs to use as they please. Why? Because they have already given you notice that they can use your photo because they have included notice about it in their terms of use. Circular and tricky, right? Right.

My point in telling you this is to remind you that just because you delete something from Facebook, doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. Who knows, that embarrassing photo of you at the office party might actually show up in Facebook’s marketing materials because you uploaded the photo and Facebook chose to include it under their “innovative features and services we develop in the future…” clause.

Just to set the expectation, understand that something uploaded to and then deleted from Facebook isn’t necessarily deleted forever.

Hopefully, that helps clear up the process of adding/editing/moving/deleting photos within your Facebook albums. If you see something that isn’t clear or have an additional tip to help others out, be sure to leave a comment!

Cheers!

–Sean