fbDownloader

Pros

• Freeware
• Fast image archiving

Cons

• Barebones UI

The fbDownloader program is freeware that simplifies downloading images and albums from Facebook.

People who use Facebook a lot to keep in touch with family and friends tend to loosely build large collections of images. These are images uploaded by them as well as people in their network. fbDownloader is a tool that helps you gather all of those images so that you can store them locally or in the cloud or just have them on hand for viewing sans Facebook.

fbDownloader lets you log in to Facebook through the application. It then gives you three options concerning what you want to download: Your tagged photos, all your photo albums or your friends’ photos. The output path defaults to My Pictures, or you can click the Change button and enter or navigate to whichever path you prefer.

The application also gives you the option to download as colored or black and white. Downloading as colored is essentially downloading as is. Downloading as black and white automatically converts images to grayscale. fbDownloader defaults to colored, or as is, and if you change to grayscale, you can’t change this option on a per-image basis, which we think limits the usefulness.

fbDownloader automatically populates a horizontal list of albums. The user interface here is rather basic, and if you’re just dealing with a few albums, it works well enough. Unfortunately, if you’re dealing with many albums and images, the UI is simply too barebones to be practical. The list can be massive. The program only lets you view about three albums at a time, and the developer has disabled maximizing the window—presumably to preserve the UI layout. Being able to maximize the Window, however, would let us at least expand the image list to be somewhat more usable.

If you want a quick and dirty way to snatch some albums off of Facebook, fbDownloader can do the trick. If you want a toolbox addition that you’ll use somewhat regularly, it’s hard to recommend fbDownloader over the many other free image downloaders that are available.

Pros

• Freeware
• Fast image archiving

Cons

• Barebones UI