One of the best features of Facebook are the photos albums, which allows you and all of your friends to upload an unlimited number of pictures to share with your personal networks.

You can also create Facebook "tag" photos, which means a person's profile is linked to the specific picture they appear in.  This gives you the very useful ability to quickly view pictures of specific people - all without ever having to dig through a photo album.

While it's great having all of these pictures online, you aren't guaranteed that they will always be available.  You can easily lose access to these photos if Facebook removes an album, if the internet is unavailable, or if the friend who uploaded the photos decides to remove them.  It is possible to save Facebook pictures individually, but that can be incredibly tedious if you have a large amount of photos you'd like to download.

In this guide, I'll show you how to download all of the Facebook tag photos that you and your friends are in with a great application called PhotoGrabber.

Getting Started

To begin, simply head over to the PhotoGrabber homepage and download the application for your operating system.  PhotoGrabber is available for both Mac (PhotoGrabber-OSX) and Windows (PhotoGrabber-Win), so make sure to download the right .zip file.

After you've downloaded the file, Windows users should extract its contents to a new folder on your computer and Mac users should unzip and drag PhotoGrabber.app into your Applications folder.

One very nice feature of PhotoGrabber is that it is a standalone executable file and requires no installation.  Once you've extracted the files, all you need to do is run pg.exe (just make sure to keep it in the same folder as the rest of the extracted files).

Downloading Facebook Photos

Now that you've downloaded and extracted PhotoGrabber, double click the PhotoGrabber executable to get started.  When you first open the program, you will be presented with a login screen.  Click the large Login button to be taken to a Facebook authentication page.

Click Allow on the Facebook authentication page which will allow PhotoGrabber to have access to your content.

Now that you've authorized PhotoGrabber to work with your account, head back to the application.  Click I want to download...

PhotoGrabber will now display a list of all of your friends, including yourself.  To download all pictures tagged with your name, simply select Myself then click the large Begin Download button.

Before the download begins, you will need to select a directory where you would like to save the tagged photos.  Click OK and the download process will start.

Facebook photos are fairly small and download quickly, but the duration of the download will vary based on how many pictures have been tagged.  It took approximately 20 minutes for me to download 1,000+ photos, but your experience may vary based on the network connection.

When the photos are finished downloading you can browse to the folder where they were saved to view them!

You can repeat this exact same process to download any tagged pictures of your friends, just select their name instead of Myself at the download selection screen.

Using the PhotoGrabber application for Facebook is great for keeping a personal copy of photos from Facebook and is an excellent way to protect them for the future.

Do you have any other tips for saving your personal content from Facebook?  Share it with us in the comments!