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. 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.
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.
Change Photo Album Privacy Settings
You can easily change the privacy setting for any photo album you’ve created.
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.
