If you ever receive an offer or recommendation to download a free Facebook app called fbDOWNLOADER, I strongly recommend that you don’t.
The “pitch” sounds so tempting: “Download all of your Facebook photos and albums directly to your PC at one time. Even download the ‘public’ pictures of your Facebook friends and other photos that you have been tagged in.”
Sound like a great app, right? The pitch sounds so good in fact that a very well-known tech expert fell for it and recommended this app on her weekly radio show and on her website.
Well, fbDOWNLOADER will indeed perform the tasks mentioned in the “pitch”, and perform them quite well. But it will also install malware on your system and hijack ALL of your installed web browsers (not just the one you used to install fbDOWNLOADER). Even worse, it will also post ads on your Facebook Timeline and try to entice your friends to install the app on their Facebook accounts as well.
The installer has check boxes where you can supposedly opt out of having your browser home page and default search provider changed, but these choices are typically ignored and your browsers are hijacked anyway. Not good!
If you want to see for yourself just how bad this app is, simply do a Google search for the term fbdownloader. You’ll see that the first few entries in the search results will take you to websites where you can download the app, but most of the pages listed explain how to remove it (Hint: it isn’t easy).
Long story short, ignore the hype and keep your PC and Facebook account secure by taking a pass on this “free” download. In my opinion, fbDOWNLOADER is bad news.
If you really need to download your photos from Facebook to your computer, you can easily do it without using any third-party software at all. Simply click on the photo you want to download to open it on its own page, then click on it and drag it to the Desktop or into some other folder.
Note: If a photo contains people, be sure to click on it close to an edge to avoid activating the “Tagging” tool.
If you want to download all your photos in one fell swoop, you can do that as well. This post explains how to download ALL of your Facebook data, including your photos.
Bottom line: fbDownloader is bad news. I recommend that you stay away from it. The good news is you can easily download your Facebook photos to your computer without it!
Bonus tip: Read this post to find out how to prevent hackers from logging into your Facebook account and posting things in your name or even taking complete control of your account.
If you think your friends would like this post, I’d love you to share it! Thanks a bunch!