Facebook makes leaving Facebook easier with Google Photos export tool

Facebook allows you to keep all your photos and videos on the service, but what if you want to backup these memories? One option is to download your user data for safe-keeping, but the social network has also developed a new tool to upload your photos and videos to Google Photos.

The company announced the tool on its engineering blog today, and it’s the first major step as part of the Data Transfer Project. This project is a collaboration between Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, and seeks to develop an easy way for users to transfer data between these services.

Facebook confirms that its open-source tool is limited to users in Ireland right now, but will be available globally in early 2020. The social network also says the tool will support other services in addition to Google Photos “in the near future.” So presumably people wanting to use iCloud or OneDrive can get in on the action soon as well.

The ability to export Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos is a great move for users wanting to back up their memories in one central repository. But it also streamlines things if you plan to delete your account, as you don’t have to download your entire chunk of user-data and manually upload content to Google Photos.

Another benefit of transferring your Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos is that you can make use of Google’s machine learning prowess. These machine-learning features include optical character recognition, object/face recognition, and automatic photo tweaks.