Guide to Making Facebook Photos Private

Change who can see what for all of your Facebook posts

Putting photos on Facebook is easy, but keeping all those Facebook photos private is another matter.

It used to be that Facebook made all photos and posts public by default, meaning anyone could see them. Facebook's privacy settings now give users more granular control over who can see what, but they can also be a bit difficult to figure out.

Basic Tutorial on Keeping Facebook Photos Private

For Facebook photos, you always have the option to make sure only your friends can view them via the inline privacy button or "audience selector" tool in the post creation box.

A Facebook user creates a post for friends only

When you click the down arrow or the button that usually says either Friends or Public, you'll see a list of options for who you want to allow to see the content you are posting.

Friends is the setting that most privacy experts recommend. It will allow only those you have connected with on Facebook to see your content. You can also choose to share posts with specific friends or custom lists of friends.

There are other photo privacy settings you can change, as well. You can review any photo in which someone has "tagged" you before the content appears on your Timeline, and you can change the sharing settings for photos and albums that have already been published.

You may want to make sure that your default Facebook sharing option is set to Friends, rather than Public. To do this, navigate to the Facebook Privacy Settings, where you can adjust a variety of other privacy settings as well.

Facebook's post privacy settings with the Friends option marked

How to Make Previously Published Facebook Photos Private

Even after you have published a photo on Facebook, you can go back and change the privacy setting to restrict viewing to fewer people or expand the viewing audience. You can either do this globally by changing the privacy setting for everything you have posted, or individually by changing the privacy settings on each photo or photo album you've posted.

To do this, navigate to the photo in question and select the three-dot icon in the upper-right corner, and then select Edit audience or Edit post audience.

The Edit post audience option of a Facebook post

Change Photo Album Privacy Settings

You can easily change the privacy setting for any photo album you've created.

Review Facebook's tagging and privacy settings for more info on how to adjust the privacy and visibility settings for your posts.

  1. Go to your Timeline or profile page, then select the Photos tab from the top menu bar.

  2. Select Albums.

    A Facebook page with the Albums tab highlighted
  3. Select the three-dot icon for the album you'd like to edit and select Edit Album.

  4. Beneath Edit Album on the lefthand side, select your preferred audience.

    A Facebook photo album with the privacy option highlighted

Tags and Facebook Photos: Managing Your Privacy

Facebook offers tags as a way to identify or name people in photos and status updates. This way Facebook can link particular users to a photo or status update published on Facebook.

Many Facebook users tag their friends and even themselves in the photos they post because it makes those photos more visible to those who are in it and easier for others to find.

Facebook provides a few settings for changing how tags work. From the Facebook privacy settings, you can change who can see the post that you are tagged in on your timeline. You can also set who the audience should be for posts that you get tagged in. These settings can be found under Account (down arrow) > Settings & Privacy > Settings > Timeline and Tagging.

Facebook tagging and timeline settings
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