Mobile Phones are pretty amazing things, aren’t they? Not only can you check your email no matter where in the world you are (as long as you have signal, of course!), but the capabilities of mobile phone camera sometimes takes my breathe away.
Cameras, on mobile phones, are great for taking pictures of lots of things, whether you are a blogger, a business owner or just about anyone, including:
- Capturing special moments
- Offering sneak peeks of upcoming products (I always think Instagram-based sneak peeks are a great idea, because there’s something more personal about it, almost as if the company is letting me peek into their personal life – so yeah, that sounded creepy!)
- Taking pictures of products that you want to review
- Snapping funny/silly/rude signs that you just have to share
But, if you are anything like me, you might have noticed that cables have this inate need to somehow sprout a pair of legs, and disappear into some random hole – presumably under the sofa, in a pets mouth etc. I don’t know how it happens, but it nearly always does, so for a long time I was always stuck with images on my phone, and no way of moving them over to my phone. Which was pretty annoying.
But wait, there’s got to be another way
And there is!
Virtually everyone is on Facebook these days, and if you’re not – why not? Because if you’re looking for a really easy and super fast way of moving images from your phone to your PC without cables, then Facebook is your new best friend.
Basically, I recently discovered that you can now sync your images with Facebook. This means that whenever you take photos on your phone’s camera, they will sync over to your Facebook account, meaning that they are ready for you to download and edit, by the time you switch your PC on – pretty neat huh?
But wait, I don’t necessarily want to share my unedited images with all my Friends and Family
Of course you don’t, that would just be crazy. However, don’t panic, because all images that sync to Facebook can only be seen by you, until you authorise them to be shared. So, don’t worry, those blurry images of the cat doing cartwheels, are totally safe!
So, how does this syncing malarky work?
First of all, you’ll need to set Facebook up to sync, which isn’t too difficult to do.
1. Open up the Facebook App on your phone (if you don’t already have the Facebook App, it’s really easy to download from the Play Store, or wherever else you can download apps).
2. If you have the updated version of Facebook (you might need to update it, if it doesn’t look like the image below), then you’ll see four icons at the bottom of the screen, and you want to select the one that looks like an open book (far right). The icons look like this:
3. The Top of the Screen that you arrive on should say “Bookmarks“, and you’ll want to scroll down, until you are nearly at the bottom, where you will find the sub-heading “Settings“: 
4. Select “App Settings“, and you’ll come to a white screen. From here, underneath “General Settings“, you want to select the option: ”Sync Photos“:
5. Now you’ll be given three options:
- Sync over Wi-Fi or Cellular (only choose this option, if you are happy to use your own date allowance. So, if you have limited data usage, you might want to avoid this one).
- Sync over Wi-Fi only (select this if you have limited data usage, but are able to connect to Wi-Fi, either at home/work/school/library etc).
- Don’t sync my photos (this is what you’ll click, if you decide – in the future – that you don’t want to sync your images any more
This area will also allow you to sync all of the photos that are already on your PC. If you don’t select this option (as you can see I haven’t), then only new photos, that you take in the future, will sync to Facebook.
That is basically all you need to do to set you the syncing, so go take some photos, so that we can move on to the next stage!
Okay, great, now how do I get this photos off Facebook, before they’re revealed to the entire world?
1. The first thing to do is make sure that your images have actually synced to Facebook, because your phone probably won’t tell you. So, head over to Facebook on your PC, and on the tool bar, at the top left of the screen, you’ll want to open the “Notifications” tab, which is the globe-shaped icon to the left of the Search Bar:
2. If the Sync has been a success, you should see something that looks like this, somewhere in the depths of your notifications:
Notice, that this does confirm the fact that the synced photos are indeed “private”.
3. Click the notification, to open up the private folder, and you’ll be able to see all of your pretty images (oooh eeer!):
4. If you do decide to share your images on your timeline, then as demonstrated above, all you need to do is select the Tick button at the top right corner of the image. The button will then turn green, and a green number will appear next to the Share Photos button, confirming how many images you are going to share.
I really do not want to share anything – argh!
5. If, on the other, you don’t want to share the image (because you’ve accidentally included the volume button, perhaps!), then all you do is leave it unselected, and it will remain private, so that only you can see it.
6. To download the picture, to your PC, just click on the photo to make it bigger:
You’ll be able to easily scroll through all your images here, using the left and right arrows.
7. At the bottom left, you’ll see two buttons. Click “Delete” if you really hate the image and want rid of it forever, or click “options” if you still want to download it.
8. Under “options“, select Download and it will be downloaded onto your PC.
