Facebook is deleting your synced photos, here's how to keep them

Today the folks at Facebook responsible for photo syncing within their system have announced that Moments will be taking over. What on earth is Moments, you might wonder. Moments is an app which organizes and "privately shares" your photos from your smartphone. What if you don't want Moments, but want to keep your synced photos? There's only one option – save and exit. The desktop viewing segment of Facebook's photo sync is about to go away forever.

If you'd like to keep your synced photos on Facebook – or FROM Facebook, rather – you'll need to log into Moments before July 7th. If you do not have a smartphone or do not want to download Moments, you'll have to download all of your synced photos.

Do download or delete your synced photos, you'll need to follow the following steps.

To download a photo you've synced:

1. Go to your profile

2. Click Photos

3. Click Synced from Phone

4. Click the photo you'd like to download

5. Click Options at the bottom of the photo then select Download

If you'd like instead to delete a photo you've synced – if you want to do this instead of letting Facebook do it for you, do these steps instead:

1. Go to your profile

2. Click Photos

3. Click Synced from Phone

4. Click the photo you'd like to delete

5. Click Delete in the bottom-left of the photo and click to confirm

If you'd like to download ALL of your synced photos all at once, go to the Synced from Phone section of your "Photos" and click the link to download your synced photos.

That's like this: https://www.facebook.com/yourusernamehere/photos_synced – where "yourusername" is your user name. There you'll find a page that says "Get Moments to Keep Your Synced Photos" with the image at the head of this article in it. There's a link that says "download your synced photos." Click it.

Then you'll have one massive download revving up, so keep your computer (or phone) plugged in – it may be a long haul.