Facebook on Thursday said that its photo transfer tool is now available across the globe in several countries including India. The service was initially unveiled in December 2019, enabling users to transfer photos and videos to other third party services. Initially, the lone third party service that users can move their photos and videos to is Google Photos with Facebook promising that integration with other services would be available soon. The company initially expanded the service to countries in Latin America and Asia Pacific in February. In March, the availability of the service was further expanded to countries in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Latin America, South East Asia and Africa. In April, Facebook announced that the service would be available in the United States and Canada.
Facebook Photo Transfer Tool Service Expanded Globally
The company highlighted that the users need to head to settings and select “Your Facebook Information” for transferring the media files. Under the “Your Facebook Information” page, users would need to select “Transfer a copy of your photos or videos” and enter their Facebook password for confirmation of identity. The users can download the information directly or choose a third party service to transfer the media. Upon selecting a third party service, the users need to select whether to export the photos or videos and enter the account credentials of the third party service. Facebook said that the users will receive a notification on Facebook and on their email upon the completion of the transfer. It has to be noted that Facebook photo transfer tool is part of the company’s participation in the Data Transfer Project initiated in 2018 between the major US tech giants.
Data Transfer Project Contributors Include Apple and Microsoft
The Data Transfer Project is intended to “create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform” designed to aid users to move their data between various service providers. The current contributors of Data Transfer Project include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. While Facebook has said that it plans “to integrate with new partners soon,” the company has not provided a specific timeline for the same. With Apple and Microsoft part of the same initiative, it remains to be seen if Facebook adds iCloud and OneDrive to the list of third party services where users can move their personal media.
