Facebook is a behemoth, harbouring over 300 million users, housing 40 million status updates a day and hosting 14 million new videos a month, it’s easy to see how the service has started to make inroads into the other media sharing services like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
One of the most popular types of media shared on the website are photos, mainly down to the simple usability of the site and the fact you can add and tag photos of friends. This allows users to view lots of different user submitted photos, possibly from the save event from many different perspectives. With 2 billion photos uploaded a month, the proof is in the statistics.
There is one drawback of having being tagged in a set of photos from the same event you attended, you don’t physically have a copy of them. Sure you could sit there and download them, one by one, but that would take all day and night if it was a particularly big album. Luckily for those people who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, there is a clever little addon that allows you to download entire Facebook albums with the click of a button.
Enter FacePAD. This addon is simple in it’s execution, it adds a small menu option to the right click menu of your Firefox interface, allowing you to download the album you wish.
To install the addon, simply navigate to the Firefox Addons page for FacePAD and click the “Download Now” button. This will download the file and install it, requiring you to restart the browser before you can use it.
Now that it is installed, navigate to the Facebook album you wish to download. You can either right click the link taking to you to the photos or you can right click the actual page that displays the photos itself. Either way, you will be presented with a right click menu, from which you just need to select “Download Album With FacePAD”:
The guys at FacePAD have also created a video tutorial which catlogs the whole process outlined above. It is embedded below for your viewing pleasure:
The only problem with Facebook photos are that they are extremely low quality. I would always recommend uploading your photos to another service such as Picasa or Flickr so you have a high quality backup of your photos online.
