Have you lost photos online?
Do you know where all your photos are? Have some gone missing?
Today I’m going to talk about some of the more popular places people lose photos and how to retrieve them.
Hi. I’m Anne. I’m a digital organizer specializing in photos. I help overwhelmed families declutter their digital environment so they can find what they need quickly.
One of the most common complaints I hear from clients is that someone shared photos with them and they don’t know how to retrieve them. Or that they had the photos at one point, to upload to one service or another, but now no longer have the original photo and are hoping they can get the photos back out of the online source.
Some of these include easy integration with upload and download settings that you can alter to suit your lifestyle, like iPhoto, Google Photos, Dropbox, and Amazon Prime Photos.
Others like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Flickr, and Photobucket don’t have the same easy settings and may need more effort to retrieve photos.
And some are a downright pain in the butt (looking at you Facebook) and when you do figure out how to download them you find out that the quality and resolution are so low that the photos are only good enough for web viewing and you will never be able to get a good print from them.
Let’s take a look at a few starting with Facebook.
Ok, here we are in Facebook. There are multiple ways to download your photos. From single photos to albums to your entire account.
I’m going to navigate to my PHOTOS,
click on ALBUMS,
select an album and
click the 3 dots.
Select DOWNLOAD
and CONTINUE.
This will download this album only.
Next, I’m going to go to the ACCOUNT tab which is the little down arrow in the upper right corner. Select SETTINGS AND PRIVACY
and then SETTINGS.
Then select YOUR FACEBOOK INFORMATION
and DOWNLOAD YOUR INFORMATION.
You'll have to put in a date range,
then I recommend deselecting all of the checkboxes.
Check only the POSTS box.
Scroll all the way to the bottom
and click START MY DOWNLOAD.
Facebook will create a download for you. When you receive a notice, either in your FB notifications as I have here, or in email, CLICK IT. You will be taken directly to your download. Click it, reenter your password and confirm. Your download will start.
And here is my download. I’m in my downloads folder. Yours will be wherever your downloads are set up to go. You can see that Facebook sent a zip file.
We need to extract the files and then find the photos.
To find the photos, we will look in the Posts folder, then Media, and then each of these folders contains photos. The rest of the files contained are links to your Facebook posts.
Now let’s explore Snapfish.
While Snapfish does allow mass downloading, it is important to note that you can only download in sets of 500 or less. Photos will download in a zip file in batches of 50. Also important to consider, Snapfish doesn’t have download capabilities from mobile devices.
To download from Snapfish,
navigate to MY PHOTOS.
From there, click the albums you want to download,
click OPTIONS on the lower left menu,
select DOWNLOAD PHOTOS.
Snapfish will download a zip file or multiple files depending on how many photos you chose. We need to extract the file and it is all photos. Note, they are no longer in albums.
Here’s a quick overview of Shutterfly.
Alright, here we are in Shutterfly. In Shutterfly, you can download your photos individually or download them in groups.
You want to navigate to ALL PHOTOS, you can click one photo and click the DOWNLOAD CLOUD icon.
Or you can highlight multiple photos in a group. And then when you're done selecting all that you want to use, you go back up and use the download cloud icon again if you have multiple photos that you want to download, then it's going to prepare a zip file. You'll get an email that says your file is ready, you click the link in the email. Click Download.
Alright, you can see the one photo that I downloaded by itself and then the other photos that I downloaded all together in a zip file so we're going to need to extract all and there you go, a single folder with all of the photos in it.
And lastly, let’s look at Photobucket.
Photobucket is a lot like Shutterfly in the way that you can download.
You want to navigate to MY BUCKET,
select a photo,
click the DOWNLOAD ARROW icon.
You can also download albums.
Navigate to your ALBUMS
HIGHLIGHT an album that you want to download,
use the DOWNLOAD ARROW and your download will start immediately.
This will be a zip file that you have to EXTRACT ALL. You can see here I have the single photo that I downloaded and I have my zip file. One of the nice things about Photobucket, as you'll notice once you have extracted all the files from the zip, inside the zip not only will you have all your photos, but they will still be in the albums that you had on Photobucket. So it does retain some of the structure that you had set in place
That’s it for today. Leave me a comment below with what platforms you have photos on and whether you’ve been able to retrieve them or not.
And if you haven't yet, Grab the audio Training on my 6 tips to easily create a photo book you will be proud to show friends and family.
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Until then, thanks for joining me!