Family Tech Blog

Tag: photos

  • TUTORIAL: How to Download All of Your Photos, Videos, and Messages from Facebook at Once

    TUTORIAL: How to Download All of Your Photos, Videos, and Messages from Facebook at Once

    There could be a number of reasons you’d want to download all of your Facebook data. Maybe you’re making a fresh start but don’t want to lose photos and videos, maybe something’s going on and you need message data downloaded, or maybe you just want to back up all your data for when the giant electromagnetic pulse goes off someday and the internet comes crashing down. Whatever reason you’re interested, here are the simple steps you can take to download all of your Facebook info at once. The tutorial video is at the bottom of this post.

    1. Go to your settings page.

     

    2. Click on Download a copy Facebook Data

     

    3. Click download archive.

     

    4. Enter your password and click Submit

     

    5. Your data downloads as a zip file.

     

    6. Once unzipped, you’ll see your files separated into folders.

     

    7. Keep somewhere safe and share with caution as some of the data is personal.

     

    There are the instructions. Here’s a video tutorial:

     

     

  • Can Your Kids Now Hide Photos from You Right in Instagram?

    Can Your Kids Now Hide Photos from You Right in Instagram?

    Kids hide images on their phones in several ways and for many reasons. Some just don’t want all of their embarrassing goofy pictures with their friends to be shared. Sometimes there’s a more sinister reason. Something involving sexting or cyberbullying. Kids can use different kinds of apps to lock away photos. There are some that look like calculators or phone utilities apps and still some that don’t hide what they do. Now, Instagram is allowing posts to be saved within the app without being made public. It’s called Archive.

    Instagram’s new archive feature allows users to remove posts from their feed without deleting them. It allows you to put the photos in an archive to be looked at in the future and even reposted. If you do repost it falls back in its original chronological order so it kind of just magically reappears where it was originally. A little arrow clock icon in the upper right corner of your profile page in the Instagram app will give you access to your archived posts. You can fill the archives by tapping on the “…” in the upper right of a post. Then just tap “Archive.”

    Why would you want to archive photos? Well, some may decide later that their post wasn’t something they’d want everyone to see. Maybe the pictures from the party you attended last month wouldn’t look good to that employer you just applied for a job with. No problem, just archive those things and you can still see them without them being public. Maybe you broke up with that guy or girl and don’t want everyone to see you together all over your Instagram page. Well, just archive them and they become a private photo stash for you to weep over on your own. Your kids will even use the feature to hide posts that didn’t get as many likes as they want.

    What Parents Should Know

    I recommend you understand the Archive feature on Instagram and learn how to find it on your kids’ profile. If you often take your kids’ phone and look at their social media behavior this is a way for them to share a photo for a brief time and then save it to an archive, knowing you’ll be looking at their feed later. If you don’t know how to access the Archived photos it’s possible you can miss some of what they’ve been posting. “Finstagram” or Spam accounts are popular with teens because it’s a way to have a more private collection of photos that they don’t share with many people. I recommend you find out if your kid has a spam account and follow it. I now, recommend you check to see what photos they’ve archived as well.

  • This Bot Predicts Your Photo’s Awesomeness

    This Bot Predicts Your Photo’s Awesomeness

    The selfie is this generation’s business card. We use these photos to say who we are and what we’re all about. We try to put our best face forward and represent ourselves as what we’d like others to think about us. Everypixel Aesthetics uses artificial intelligence to tell you whether or not humans will think your photo is awesome. Its created to scan your stock photos to help you choose what to use for your designs but is it a stepping stone to using AI to define beauty?

     

     

     

     

    While this photo of me scored 100% on the awesomeness scale (and labeled me a Young Adult) I don’t feel as if most of us would put a lot of credit on an AI and it’s opinion of our photo. I do, however, wonder about our young teens. As discussed in an earlier post about the adolescent brain and another post about the narcism of the Instagram selfie taker, our young people can sometimes have poor judgement when it comes to self esteem. With apps like Tinder, After School, and Wishbone our kids are letting their photos or photos of what they love be judged and voted on by a simple tap of a screen or swipe. This level of constant scrutiny can give our kids some very serious identity issues. What feelings could the opinion of an artificially intelligent bot cause to rise up in our kids?

    What Parents Should Know

    (The opinion is strong in this one.)

    Everypixel Aesthetics is in beta. It’s not a widely known service and it’s intended to rate stock photos, not to judge your looks. My apprehension is about what can result from giving AI the ability to rate someone’s photo. What about sites/apps like PrettyScale that will tell you if you’re pretty or not based on some pre-designated programing? What will something like that do to our kids’ self image? While that sort of app is always intended for entertainment it’s important to know our children and give them the confidence that can only come from knowing truly who they are. Helping our sons and daughters know that their beauty is based on more than their outside appearance is a major job of the parent. 

    I recommend learning all you can about what your child may consider beautiful or ugly. Keep them from using silly image rating apps and websites until you know they can truly see it as entertainment and laugh off a potential negative result. Everypixel Aesthetics gave some pretty interesting looking photos very low scores. I don’t know why or what institutes an “awesome” picture but imagine your daughter uploading a picture of herself and getting a low score. How could that make her feel? I think we should take an active role in helping our children develop a high self esteem while protecting them from influences on the outside that will hinder that progress. What do you think?

     

  • Facebook Creepers Beware!

    Facebook Creepers Beware!

    Anonymity on the internet is and has always been a myth. Facebook, however, has become a place where people can search for others and learn all about their lives without revealing their creepy behavior. Facebook’s new Stories feature is changing that a bit. In a move to keep and attract younger users Instagram and Facebook messenger added their own version of Snapchat’s stories. That feature has now been rolled out to the main Facebook app and it gives people an way to see who’s been watching. 

    Facebook’s stories are photos and videos that post in vertical-full screen format on your phone. They last only 24 hours and you can add text or drawings on the screen and the in-app camera has filters, masks, and overlays that you can add to your photos as well. There is also an option to see who looked at your photo or watched your video. This is a major difference for Facebook since the standard has been to go see what folks are up to with no threat of them finding out you’ve been watching. This may be good news for you because you don’t like the idea of people looking at your stuff without you knowing. Or, this may be disturbing because you, my friend, are the creeper. 

    What Parents Should Know

    Facebook is trying to become a real social media contender for young people again, so parents should be keeping tabs on the moves their making. The stories on Facebook add another way for people to show the reality of their life and world which is what your kid or teen likes to see and do on social media. You should encourage your son or daughter to keep an eye on who’s watching their story. Let them know that the feature is there and that if they’re using Stories they should go check out who’s been following their Story.

    Remind them, also, that anonymity online is a myth and that everything that is posted online can be there forever. Just because their Story disappears from Facebook after a day doesn’t mean it’s truly gone. Screenshots can capture an image and then it can be uploaded anywhere else on the internet. The rule should be that you never post anything on the internet that you don’t want the entire world to see and that you don’t want to be there forever. I say that these rules are good for us to teach our kids but some of us parents may need to remember these warnings as well.

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  • This App Turns Deleting Bad Photos into Good Clean Fun

    This App Turns Deleting Bad Photos into Good Clean Fun

    The Struggle is Real

    Taking photos of a two year old, five year old, seven year old, and nine year old is a process. We’ll take six to ten to find the one that looks good. The result of this is our phones filling up with a crazy number of unusable pictures that don’t get deleted because, well, it’s a pain in the butt. Photowipe is a new app that will make deleting those unintentionally motion blurred pics easier and maybe a little bit fun.

    The app will show you large versions of the pictures on your camera roll and will delete them based on your gestures on the phone. Simply swipe to the side to see the next photo or swipe up to add the current picture to the “trashcan.” The deleted photos will be stored for thirty days in a trash folder unless you force delete them all, which I will be doing every time.

    Also Read: Are your teens hiding photos in a calculator?

    We Say Give it a Try

    It’s a pretty good idea and actually a bit crazy that it’s just now come to be. Now it’s super simple to get rid of those pictures of your toddler’s nasty spaghetti face that you took because you thought it would make a good text message to your husband or all the memes you’ve saved to your camera roll to post in Facebook comments. You can use the slideshow below to get started.

     

  • How Social Media Sites Use Your Photos to Learn About You

    How Social Media Sites Use Your Photos to Learn About You

    A new extension (plugin or addon for a web browser) has just highlighted an issue we all probably won’t be surprised by but have never thought about. Our social media sites are scanning our photos to learn more about us. The extension is called, get ready it’s a mouthful, “Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags Extension” and it displays the detailed tags that Facebook has used to label your photos when you post them to the site. The tag information is built by automatically scanning every image you post and using the information to create trackable details about that image. So, for instance, if you post an image of you and your kids at the zoo it may show tags that say: “3 people, smiling people, animals, nature.”

     

     

    This may seem like no big deal but when you think about just how much information can be obtained from a simple thoughtless upload of a family photo, it can get a bit creepy. Most likely this info is used to help Facebook target you better with those advertisers who pay for the privilege to use the data to identify potential customers. It also is used to help with search results when someone is looking for photos of you or somewhere you’ve been.

    Use this as a tool!

    Oversharing online is more than just annoying. When you post a picture of your food that nobody cares about you are identifying yourself as a consumer who wants to be advertised to about that type of food. When you post that bad blurry picture of your kids in their princess dress, you’re highlighting that you should be targeted with more Disney advertising. Use this extension as a tool to help you learn that lesson, and teach it to your kids.

    This extension can be a pretty cool way to help you and your kids see how much information about you is available when you post online. I always advocate for parents to teach their kids that the internet is a public place. Whatever you post can and will be used against you IRL (in real life) and so you should think about that before you post. This extension may be a great way to drive that advice home with your kids.

    If you want to see for yourself, you can download the chrome extension HERE.