Facebook will soon let you easily migrate those hundreds of old photos and videos you uploaded ages ago to other services like Google Photos. In a blog post, the social network said it’s rolling out a new tool in Ireland that allows you to port your Facebook media without having to manually download and upload it someplace else.
The announcement is the result of Facebook’s participation in the Data Transfer Project, an open-source initiative to enable cross-platform data migration between various platforms. Facebook has been a member of the project for a while along with Apple, Google, Twitter, and more. Incidentally, the tools that allow you to download all your Facebook or Google data were based on the code developed through the Data Transfer Project as well.
“At Facebook, we believe that if you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. That’s the principle of data portability, which gives people control and choice while also encouraging innovation,” wrote the company’s Director of Privacy and Public Policy, Steve Satterfield in the post.
Facebook says it’s currently testing the new tool in Ireland and plans to make it available for the rest of the markets sometime in mid-2020. You can find its option in your Facebook settings under the Your Facebook Information section. The feature will be initially limited to Google Photos but Facebook claims it will eventually work with more services.
What’s more, Google hasn’t made any announcements, hence it remains to be seen whether you would be able to transfer media to your Facebook profile from other platforms. We also don’t know much about how this new feature will function and more importantly, if it will include an option to delete the files from Facebook once they have been transferred.
Facebook has had a rocky past few quarters and many users have been pulling the photos and videos they’ve uploaded over the years from the social network. Although the company has struggled to stay out of the news, it has seemingly stirred up a new controversy every week. On November 25, Facebook revealed private data of “hundreds of their users” was compromised through malicious third-party Android apps.
Up until now, users were forced to manually download their data and re-upload it to the cloud storage of their choice. The new tool will eliminate this hassle, although it won’t be available for at least another six months.
