How to Remove Friends+ From Facebook Photos

Friends+ is one of the more annoying features that Facebook has rolled out recently, in my opinion. If you aren’t familiar, there was a period of time during which every tagged photo on Facebook was automatically set to Friends+ and there was nothing you could do about it. This meant that all of your friends saw every picture of you that someone tagged, and everything you tagged was shared with all of their friends.

All of this had nothing to do with your privacy settings. If your photo album was set to “Friends Only,” it didn’t matter. Friends+ was Facebook’s way of forcing you to share more than you might have been comfortable with.

It was also really annoying for friends of someone with a friend who tagged everything.

Eventually everyone started complaining because people they didn’t know (aka their friends’ friends) could now comment on their pictures because of the automatic Friends+ setting.

I don’t know about you, but I just stopped tagging my content on Facebook. Better safe than sorry — you don’t know who your friends’ friends are!

The good news, however, is that Facebook has changed this setting back.

Eliminating the Friends+ Setting From Facebook Photos

Step #1: Locate the gear image on the album or photo

Please note that no matter what your current setting is, you must choose ‘Custom.’ This won’t change your previous setting, it will just customize it (read: allow you to change the Friends+ setting).

Step #2: Uncheck “Friends of those tagged”

This is easy enough, but it’s also where it gets a bit frustrating.

You might find that every album is different, and this setting won’t even exist on albums created prior to Friends+. All of my albums from July 2011 on have this setting. The good news is that you can check each album individually and pretty quickly from the photo album main page.

That’s not the most annoying part, though. You can change the settings for full albums unless those albums are mobile uploads or wall photos. On photos in those albums, you have to change the settings on every. single. photo. separately. If you don’t tag anything from your phone, then it’s not a big deal at all. If you do, though, or if you go back and tag people later, you may want to double check on that, because every photo you upload in one of those two ways will automatically become Friends+ again. There is currently no way that I’ve found to opt out of that default.

Step #3: Save your settings

Why should you care if other people can see your photos?

First and foremost, it negates the “privacy” of those photos. I like the content I post to Facebook to only be seen by my friends, and I know there are others who feel similarly. I understand that nothing you put online is ever totally private, but you can do your best.

You might trust your friends, but how do you know that you can trust their friends? When you leave those privacy settings on Friends+, you really never know who’s going to see that picture. It only needs to come across one wrong screen for you to regret ever tagging it in the first place. (I’m looking at you, in particular, college students.)

Second of all, and what is the tipping point for me, anyway, is that it’s a matter of courtesy. I don’t know about you, but I get annoyed when I’m scrolling through my newsfeed and it’s being clogged up by 27 tagged pictures of my friends with people I don’t know. I have no clue who these people are, much less where they are and what they’re doing.

Also, you forfeit the right to complain or be creeped out when someone you don’t know starts commenting on your photos if you choose to leave them on Friends+. You’ll probably find out later that it’s your friend’s great aunt’s estranged husband from 1973, but you’ve sort of left yourself open for that one.

Are there cases when Friends+ could be useful? Maybe. The only two events that come to mind are babies and weddings, but even then… I’m not convinced.

Oh, and one more thing: If you ever want to check out how your profile looks to any of your friends or to the public, “View As…“ is one of the most underrated Facebook features. You’ll know right away what the public sees when they visit your profile. It’s one of my favorite tools, but sort of hard to find in Timeline, so here you go!

What do you think of Friends+? Love it? Hate it? Find it kind of annoying to see a bunch of other people’s pictures? Leave a comment and let me know, and feel free to share this post with your Facebook friends!

Image Source: mconnors/morgueFile