How to break an album sync between iPhoto and Facebook
I love the ease of managing my pictures on iPhoto. Downloading pictures straight from the camera is incredibly fast and easy, and iPhoto manages them faster than manually setting up folders and downloading pictures into them by date. Yes, I used to do that and it was one of the biggest reasons why I hated taking pictures – because I had to organize them.
iPhoto makes it easier and includes many other incredible features. One of the new features in iPhoto 09 allows you to select pictures and upload them directly into Facebook! It is faster and easier than the Facebook app that uploads pictures from your hard drive. But there is a problem!
It’s great that you can manage the Facebook pictures right from iPhoto, you can add, delete, and rearrange photos in iPhoto and it will update your Facebook album to match what you have on iPhoto. The problem is, if you want to start cleaning up your hard drive by backing up photos and archiving them, they will also be deleted from Facebook!
After trial and error and errors and trials, I had to figure out a way to keep my pictures on Facebook while I archived and or deleted the same album in iPhoto! Well, until Apple comes up with a fix, here is a tried and true method on how to do this!
Here is the goal: To delete a synced iPhoto/Facebook but keep the Facebook album untouched. This is the step by step process that I have repeated over and over with complete success!
1. Exit iPhoto and login to Facebook
2. Change your Facebook password
Click on the Account button to see the drop down, then click Settings and the “Change” in the Password setting. Type a new Facebook password and click “Change Password” – make note of the changed password to avoid banging your head on the table later!
3. Open iPhoto
4. Click on a synced iPhoto/Facebook album
The following message window will appear:
“An error occurred with the publication of album “(NAME OF SYNCED ALBUM.”
“Authentication with server failed. Please check your login and password information.”
5. Delete the album on iPhoto.
Delete the album, or albums of choice in iPhoto! Since iPhoto cannot sync to Facebook, your Facebook album will stay untouched.
6. Keep or Change your Password on Facebook
Go back to Facebook and either change password back to your previous one or keep the new password. This is up to you.
7. Re-sync iPhoto with Facebook
iPhoto will not re-sync even if you change your Facebook password back to the previous password. You will need to re-sync.
The fastest way is to do this is to select one picture from your iPhoto library and click the Facebook icon like you would do to add the photo to Facebook.
Choose whom you want the photos viewable by then click on the “Change Accounts” button.
Fill out the appropriate fields with your user email, your new/current Facebook password, and that picture will now sync with Facebook as a new album. Do whatever you want with this album in iPhoto (delete or keep).
All your current iPhoto albums are now re-synced with Facebook! The deleted album is gone and will not sync which keeps the original Facebook album completely intact!
And there you have it. In minutes you can delete all the albums on iPhoto that you do not want anymore and all the Facebook albums will be kept exactly the way they are!
Was this helpful – please let me know! Thanks!
Glenn is a former financial analyst, close-up magician, and hockey player. He is now a writer, novelist, screenwriter, 
HA! I didn’t know this and was banging my head! I was so mad at iPhoto. Apple needs to fix this.
Wow. It worked! Thanks!
i can’t get the facbook album deleted… i’ve tried pressing delete and moving to trash but nothing happens and the facebook albums in iphoto are stil there but i want them gone, please help!
Theresa,
Are you trying to delete the iPhoto albums and keep the Facebook album intact as I discussed in this post? If you follow the steps and are ready to delete the iPhoto album make sure you Control-Click or Right-Click on the album that has the Facebook icon and choose Delete. A message window will ask you to confirm “Are you sure you want to stop publishing and delete the album “Name of Album”?”
Click on “Delete” – This should delete the album from iPhoto.
Let me know if works!
thank you so much for this brilliant tips.. alot of mac user hving the same problem with keeping their FB album untouched after cleaning up their Hard Disk .
This was very helpful and easy to understand!! I wish I would have seen this post BEFORE I deleted a years worth of pictures from iphto (after I backed them up on my external hard drive of course). Now I have about 10 empty albums on facebook and I’m pretty frustrated. At least I can prevent this from happening in the future!
Thank you!!! I have hundreds of albums on Facebook that I’ve uploaded via iPhoto over the past year and a half, and just started a HUGE hard drive clean since my computer was crawling under the weight of all of my files. I deleted three albums before I noticed the Facebook sidebar updating in iPhoto and am SO SO SAD (and frustrated! I just keep thinking of all of the tags and comments that are lost…) to see my albums disappear on Facebook. Your article is great, and I have un-synced and am deleting freely now. Thanks again!
Thank you for the very helpful infos.
Glad it worked out for you! I have a lot of people emailing me about this article because they were running into the same problems I was. I’m going to research a little more and see if there are more ways to accomplish this task with Facebook and iPhoto! Stay tuned!
Wow, thank you soooo very much. I work for a radio station and we’re constantly adding up new pictures from events. You can only imagine the frustration level when a few of my albums where sync’d and deleted! So, Thank you again!!
I’m glad it helped! I get alot of emails about it and this little iPhoto tip has helped out quite a few people!
I’ve tried pressing delete and moving to trash but nothing happens and the facebook albums in iphoto are still there but i want them gone. I had to figure out a way to keep my pictures on Facebook while I archived and or deleted the same album in iPhoto.
this fixed the problem! Thanks
Hi all, ye may skip step 1 to step 3 by clicking on the setting button on the iphoto and remove the facebook album from iphoto. Follow step 4 onwards as mentioned above thereafter. Hope that helps
OMG I found this right after I deleted my photos from iPhoto and now every photo album I uploaded to Facebook using iPhoto were gone! I’m feeling real mad but I can’t do anything already. Anyway it works actually. Thanks a lot!
Excellent thinking. Here’s a related question: Can you sync more than one iPhoto Library to the same FB album?
Thanks
Interesting question – but why? Just drag and drop the photos into that album in iPhoto and update the FB album with pictures from different projects.
Sorry.
Thanks! I’ll try that!
COOLNESS! Glad it worked.
If you follow the steps and are ready to delete the iPhoto album make sure you Control-Click or Right-Click on the album that has the Facebook icon and choose Delete. Thanks a lot.
I’ve had the same problem as a lot of people–deleting photos and having them vanish from Facebook. Does anyone know of a way to restore the albums to Facebook in a way that will also restore tags, commments, etc., or are they gone and gone forever? Good to know there’s a way to avoid this in the future, though.
Hi there, I’ve bookmarked your article as I’ll be using it in the near future. I was wondering if you’d be able to help with a dilemma I have but have not seen mentioned anywhere online yet, which others may well be experiencing.
I realised that my facebook albums have disappeared BEFORE I emptied my iPhoto trash can (after back up). I dragged all photos I was going to bin back into the iPhoto library, but they’ve not been restored on Facebook.
I’ve logged in and out of FB a couple of times and closed and reopened iPhoto to give it a chance to re-sync with Facebook, but the photos still aren’t there. Are they going to come back?
Help much appreciated at this ‘difficult time’
– Thanks, Katie.
Thanks a lot! Very useful stuff!!!
Have used it a couple of times and works perfectly.
This thing was doing my head in.
Do you by any chance know if this would also work with flickr albums?
Thanks again!
I deleted three albums before I noticed the Facebook sidebar updating in iPhoto and am SO SO SAD (and frustrated! I just keep thinking of all of the tags and comments that are lost.
Yup. There should be a warning telling you that its gonna delete FB albums!
Another way that works is to change the name of the album on Facebook, then the association is lost and you can safely delete from iPhoto.
I would like to study 4 different types of photography in college. These are the four types:Baby Photography-Black and White Photography-Portrait Photography-Landscape Photography.So what is the best kind of camera for these types of photography? And don’t worry about the price.Thanks
The ‘best’ is up to the photographer. I prefer Canon cameras.
It will change in iPhoto when you do that.
Hi, thanks for the warning, I haven’t ckeaned up/deleted iphoto albums yet, so have not encountered this yet. I have what might be a simpler problem. I have created FB albums, which I want to stay as they are, but I also want to modify the original photos in iPhoto. But when I do this, they automatically sync to FB, including to the wall’s of others who were tagged in the original photos. Is there a way I can play on iPhoto without this happening in FB
thanks
Hi Glenn! It seems like you know a lot about this stuff, so I’m going to ask you a question that I just can’t find an answer to.
Tonight I saw one of those facebook sample ads where it wants you to set up an ad with one of my photos in it to promote my page. I’ve seen these before, but this one had a photo from my iPhoto library. One that I’ve never uploaded. I’ve got iPhoto 08 and have never purposefully synced them. What the heck just happened? Facebook seems so tricky. I really don’t want facebook digging around my offline computer files! My facebook ad preferences are all set to “no one.” What can I do to block facebook from snooping my computer?
No, I have never published it on facebook. Yesterday it did it with a second photo and I had never published that one either! I may have put them on my personal website, but never on facebook.
Yes I did link to my website on my info section in my profile! UNREAL! Thank you so much! I am taking that link off right now. That kind of stuff bothers me.
HELP! I have iPhoto 11 and the process for breaking the sync between iPhoto and Facebook is not working! Any ideas???
iPhoto keeps all your photos in a “library” so you can’t select them like that. Depending what version of iPhoto you have you can upload them straight from the iPhoto app. In iPhoto, on the bottom left there should be a “Facebook” section. Drag photos there and they will upload.
when im in facebook and click upload photos i go to pictures then i can easily pick an individual photo from photobooth but from iphoto i can select.
Glenn – i have iphoto 09 and I keep receiving this error when trying to connect to facebook..An error occurred with iPhoto Uploader. Please try again later….Any idea. I’ve tried loading everything except going to ’11. Appreciate the help!
Try clicking “Settings” at the bottom right of iPhoto. Click “Remove Account” then try to sync your account to iPhoto again by repeating the process but this time connecting iPhoto to FB.
While this workaround does work, I have also published to and sync’d my Flickr albums, so rather than changing passwords I simply turn off my Airport connection to the network, and open iPhoto in local mode. Then I clean up my FB (& Flickr) albums and archive old photos as above. When I’m done, I simply reconnect to the network and viola, problem solved.
It seems to work if you delete the iPhoto album (ie. deletes album but keeps photos in your Library)- but if you actually trash the photos – they disappear from Facebook?