Facebook Makes It Easier To Shuttle Photos And Videos To Dropbox

If you've been on Facebook for years, there's a good chance you have considerable amounts of content uploaded to the social media platform — content you may want to download for safe-keeping before abandoning or deleting the account. Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out the ability to back up photos and videos to Google Photos; this time around, it has added support for Dropbox and a relatively new European company.

Facebook has been around for more than a decade in one form or another; users who have been with it since the start may be ready to move on, but find the idea of manually downloading all of their data daunting. The expansion of Facebook's photo transfer tool comes ahead of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hearing on data portability scheduled for September 22.

Facebook first partnered with Google to enable its users to directly shuttle their images and videos from the social media platform to their Google Photos account. This time around, Facebook has partnered with EU-based Koofr and popular cloud storage company Dropbox to offer the same functionality.

The new feature is available starting today, September 3, with Facebook explaining that data portability 'encourages innovation.' This feature differs from the ability to download all of one's Facebook data, which includes quite a bit more than just pictures and videos and would require more time to sort through.

Rather, the photo transfer tool rolled out earlier this year allows users to quickly shuttle that media to another platform, where it can then be downloaded to a local device or uploaded to a different service. Dropbox and Koofr both show up as options iin the photo transfer tool with additional options teased for the future.