Quickly return #DeleteFacebook photo export back to nicely named galleries

Over the weekend I took the first steps toward deleting my Facebook account, I exported my data. If you haven’t done it yet, you should (here’s how) even if you don’t plan on actually deleting your account. It is full of interesting information about what Facebook tracks, stores, and probably leverages to make you keep coming back.

One really annoying thing I found in the export was that my image galleries had all been encoded in non-human-readable folders. This isn’t great for storing my images long-term outside of Facebook. So, I wanted a quick way to parse the HTML files Facebook provided into folders named for the galleries I originally created when uploading the photos.

/photos/771477206433/771477221403.jpg => /photos/Hiking Whitney/

Over the weekend, we built this super simple Facebook-export parsing tool (open-source). All you need to do is drag the Zip file export you get from Facebook onto https://fb.textile.photos and you get back a new Zip file with all your galleries restored. The app runs entirely in the browser, which means none of your data is ever shared with our servers, we don’t track you, and we don’t collect anything about you. Feel free to give it a try,

Want something more?

If you are looking for a longer term solution to backup, share, and manage your photos now, sign up for textile.photos. We are building a new tool for you to securely manage and share all your photos on the web. Our mission is to return personal data ownership to people, we think photos is an interesting place to start. Sign-up today to give it a try.