Facebook has developed and launched a tool that will allow members to transfer their precious photos and videos to another cloud platform.
The new tool will allow the transfer of this media to Google Photos, the popular photo sharing and storage service from the Alphabet division.
Google Photos is a popular cloud platform, as it gives users free, unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution.
Facebook revealed the data transfer tool in a blog post on Monday.
The social network said that since 2010 it has given members to access a secure copy of the data they have shared with Facebook.
But some have complained that process was slow, and with a growing number of people leaving Facebook, there was concern about safeguarding these images.
“In 2018, we announced our participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaborative effort with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter to build a common way for people to transfer their data between online services,” blogged Facebook.
It said the goal of this project has been to make it easier for services of any size to securely make direct transfers for data portability from one service to another and to make the process simpler for the people who use these services.
“Today, we are announcing a new tool on Facebook that allows people to transfer photos and videos directly from Facebook to Google Photos,” said the social networking giant.
“We plan to expand this to other services in the near future,” it added. “This tool will begin rolling out in Ireland today and will be available worldwide in early 2020.”
Facebook also said it planned to include other services in future as part of its commitment to “data portability”.
Facebook said the tool had taken it a year to develop, and it has included extra authentication steps to ensure only the owner of the account can transfer a file.
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