What you actually get
A saved Facebook photo is a JPEG, at most 2048 pixels on its longest side, weighing somewhere between about 70 KB and 250 KB depending on how much detail is in the picture. Three photos taken at random from one public page came back 1638×2048, 2048×2048 and 2048×1152 — the long edge is the constant, the shape is whatever was uploaded.
That is the largest copy Facebook holds for public viewing, and it is the copy this tool hands you. Nothing is upscaled, re-compressed or watermarked on the way past.
Which photo links work
Paste any of these into the box above:
- the address bar of an open photo, which looks like
facebook.com/photo?fbid=… - a Copy link from the share sheet in the mobile app, which produces a short
facebook.com/share/p/…address that says nothing about what it points at - the longer
facebook.com/<page>/photos/…form that search results use - a photo posted to a Story — those are handled by the Story downloader, which picks the one card your link names rather than the first in the tray
If a photo sits in an album, the album context in the link is ignored: the same picture reached from two different albums is one picture, and you get the same file either way.
Why the tool opens the photo’s own page
This is the part that separates a full-size save from a thumbnail, and it is worth knowing because it explains what other tools get wrong.
A post that contains a photo carries that photo twice over: once as the picture you see in the feed, which is around 640 pixels wide, and once as a reference to the photo’s own page. The small copy is not simply a scaled-down file you can ask for at a bigger size — the dimensions are written into the URL and signed, so editing the numbers produces a link the server rejects rather than a larger picture.
So when you paste a post or a share link, the tool reads which photo the post is about and opens that photo’s page, because that is the only page carrying the full render. It costs an extra second and it is the difference between 640 pixels and 2048.
Why it is never the original file
No downloader can give you the file that left the photographer’s camera, and any that says otherwise is describing something it cannot do. Facebook re-encodes every upload on arrival: it resizes to its own ceiling, compresses to its own quality target, and discards the original. What remains on the servers is the processed copy, and the processed copy is the most anyone outside the account can retrieve.
For nearly every purpose — reposting, printing small, keeping a copy of something you were sent — 2048 pixels is more than enough. For anything where the original genuinely matters, ask whoever posted it.
The file says .png, the download says .jpg
Occasionally a photo’s address ends in .png and the file you receive is a JPEG. That is not a mistake on either side: Facebook stores the upload under its original name and converts it when it serves it, announcing the conversion in the link rather than in the filename.
This tool reads what is being delivered rather than what the link is called, so the extension on your saved file matches the bytes inside it. A JPEG named .png opens in some programs and not others, which is a confusing thing to hand somebody.
What the file does not carry
Facebook strips a photo’s embedded metadata when it is uploaded, and the copy you save is made from that stripped version. Checked on three files: no EXIF block, no XMP, no colour profile. In practice that means:
- no camera information — make, model, lens, shutter speed and ISO are gone
- no location — GPS coordinates are removed on upload and cannot be recovered from a downloaded copy
- no capture date — the file’s timestamp will be when you saved it, not when the picture was taken
- no colour profile — colours are interpreted as plain sRGB, which is what browsers and phones assume anyway
If you need any of that, the person who took the photo still has it in the original.
On a phone
The reason to use a downloader on a phone rather than holding the picture down is that the save option is not always offered, and when it is, some apps hand you a screen-sized copy rather than the full one.
Open the photo, use the share button, choose Copy link, then paste it here. The saved file goes to your usual downloads folder, and on iOS you can move it to Photos from there. Nothing needs installing and you do not sign in to anything.
Desktop, in three clicks
Open the photo so it fills the viewer rather than sitting in the feed — the address in your browser should contain photo?fbid=. Copy that address, paste it above, and pick the file. Right-clicking the picture in the feed instead will usually save the 640-pixel copy, which looks fine on screen and disappointing anywhere else.
If you arrived from a search result and the address looks like facebook.com/<page>/photos/…, that works too. There is no need to tidy it up first: the tracking parameters Facebook and your phone attach are ignored.
When a link does not work
Three things account for almost every failure, and none of them need troubleshooting so much as recognising:
- The post is gone. Photos get deleted, pages are taken down and accounts are closed. A link to something that no longer exists cannot be repaired at this end — open it in a browser and you will see exactly what the tool sees.
- The link arrived with text attached. Share sheets on some phones copy the caption along with the address. If nothing happens, check you have pasted the whole link and nothing but the link.
- It is a profile link, not a photo link. A link to somebody’s page names a person, not a picture. Open the photo first, then copy.
Facebook also rearranges the inside of its pages without announcing it, which is the honest reason any tool of this kind occasionally stops working for a day. When that happens it is a repair at our end, not something you did wrong.
What you may keep, and what you may publish
Saving a copy does not change who owns the picture. A photograph belongs to whoever took it, and posting it to Facebook does not put it in the public domain — it grants Facebook a licence, not you.
Keeping a copy of something for yourself is ordinary and uncontroversial: a picture a friend posted of you, a recipe card, a poster with an address on it, an image you made yourself. Republishing someone else’s photograph under your own name is a different act, and it is the one that generates complaints. The longer piece on where that line sits applies to photographs exactly as it does to video.