Everything You Need To Know About Hiding Photos On Facebook

You open up your Facebook on the Sunday morning after your first night out in months, and there it is: A photo from the Uber home, mascara smeared, eyes bleary. On top of being a bad picture, it's extremely not your personal brand. After you're done all-caps texting the now ex-friend who posted it, your next task is to find out how to hide the photo on Facebook.

Facebook friends lists can often be long, outdated, and filled with people you know from different areas of your life, so it’s crucial to know how to hide photos from specific people on Facebook. “Sometimes there’ll be a photo that I really want to post, but I only want certain friends to see it,” Alex, 18, tells Bustle. “I have a lot of Facebook friends who I don’t actually want to see what I’m posting, so I like being able to choose who to hide photos from.”

Ready to clean up your digital footprint? Here’s how to hide photos on Facebook.

How To Hide Photos On Facebook

For photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook, open the post you’d like to hide and select the three dots in the upper right of the caption. The menu may be worded differently depending on whether you’re using the mobile app or the desktop website, but options like “Edit privacy” and “Edit audience” will open a list of different privacy settings for you to choose from. To edit these settings while creating a post, use the audience selector beneath your name to choose who it’ll be visible to; you can choose from options like public, friends, specific friends, only me, or a custom list.

For photos that are part of albums uploaded to Facebook, you have to change the privacy settings on the whole album. You can do this by clicking over to the album’s page, and clicking on the little people icon that’s next to the album name. There, you’ll see the same audience selector options.

For posts you’re tagged in, which also appear on your timeline and in the Photos section of your profile, you don’t have control over who can see them; only the user who posts a photo can edit that photo’s privacy settings. Luckily, Facebook still lets you remove the tag from photos you want to hide from your profile by tapping the three dots in the upper right of the post and selecting “Remove tag.” While this can rid your profile of an unflattering group photo, keep in mind that the picture itself will still be visible to the audience it’s shared with. To fully remove it, you’ll have to ask the person who posted it to delete it. (If the person refuses to remove it and the photo goes against Facebook’s Community Standards — for example, if it contains personally identifiable information like your driver’s license number — you can report the photo.)

If you want to remove a photo from your profile page but still keep it on other parts of Facebook, like News Feed and Search, hit the three dots in the top right of the post and select “Hide from profile.” This won’t change who’s able to see your photo — it may show up in search results, or on a friend’s page — and you’ll still be tagged in it, but the post will no longer appear on your profile.

How To Hide Photos From Non-Friends On Facebook

When posting your own photos, within the audience selector, choose the “Friends” setting to keep posts within your own friend circle. If you’d like to double-check which photos are visible to the public, you can tap the three dots on the right side of your profile page and select “View As.” This mode shows you what non-friends will see when they view your profile, so you can rest assured that your photos from last night’s party are safely hidden from people you’re keeping off your friends list.

How To Hide Photos From Specific People On Facebook

The audience selector offers several different settings for hiding posts from specific people. If you choose the “Friends except…” option, you can select the users you want to keep your post away from. You can choose as many or as few people as you want, so feel free to type in names of old classmates and overbearing relatives to your heart’s desire before posting.

The “Specific friends” option in the menu does the opposite. If you have a post referencing a hilarious inside joke you know several close friends will appreciate, you can select only their names to keep the post private to those people.

With the ability to curate your audience for each post, you can ensure your pics are only reaching certain friends. Go ahead and share those selfies without worrying about judgment from your ex.