The problem

When my school friends who I don’t talk to or care about started to add me on Instagram I realised that it was time to jump ship on one or the other, and as you can tell from the preceeding link I chose the one where you don’t just add everyone you’ve ever been in proximity with and then hate them.

I hate Facebook for a number of reasons, one of the biggest being their attitude towards users and their data, and their role in providing targeted advertising to a bunch of political campaigns recently has caused me to decide to opt out after 12 years.

For those counting, that’s almost the entirety of my adult life.

One of the big problems was FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). What about the events? What about the photos? Well being an antisocial bastard, finally only the photos were a worry.

So I decided to archive my data. I used three methods, because Facebook doesn’t like to make it easy.

1. Facebook’s built-in “download your data”

This will give you all of your chats, IPs you logged in from, very creepily all of the advertisers they gave your contact information to (Booz Allen Hamilton needed my email address why? I feel justified already) and then a bunch of really shitty low-res copies of photos and videos you uploaded. Critically, none of the stuff you’re tagged in. After the aforementioned 12 years, my archive came to around 31MB. They’re pulling on that FOMO again, and I fucking resent it. So then I found:

2. odrive

odrive is a piece of software a la Dropbox which also allows you to sync with things like social media accounts to download all of your photos and vidoes locally. I simply signed up by logging in with Facebook (see what I did there?) and got it to sync all of my uploaded photos and videos in a higher resolution. Then I archived everything out of that local directory and deleted my odrive account. I still, by this point, don’t have my tagged photos, however.

3. Download FB Album mod

This looks pretty shonky but that’s because it solves the problem first and then goes back and does UI… And it solves the problem in the best way you can when a company doesn’t want you to do something via their API: scraping.

Once you have Download FB Album mod installed in Chrome, log in to your account and navigate to the album you’re after (in this case “Photos of you”) click on the extension and click on “Normal”. It will then proceed to invisibly infiniscroll until it’s got everything and present you with a nice album interface where you can save it all.

The result

So after backing all this shit up and deleting (sorry, “deactivating” for 2 weeks and then finally deleting because they’re sure you’ll change your mind) my account, I felt strangely freed. I take more photos. I reach out to friends because I wonder how they’re doing, despite the fact I’d never look at Facebook to find out anyway. People don’t expect me to message them back on Facebook or know what’s going on in their lives.

Mostly though I’ve got a leg to stand on when I say I hate Facebook and their business model.