Import photos from Facebook, Instagram or a folder

Anyone with twenty years of photos rarely has them in one place. An external drive with a folder per year, a Facebook account still holding the albums from ten years ago, an Instagram profile from when the children were small. Until now, moving all that meant dragging things over in batches, waiting, and working out afterwards what had ended up there twice. Since this week there is a page of its own for it, with three sources.

What you can import

• A folder on your computer, with everything below it. Subfolders become subfolders on Ohhi.
• The export of your Facebook account, so posts with photos, albums and videos.
• The export of your Instagram account: posts, reels, stories, IGTV and profile photos.

The page works in the browser on a computer. On a phone there is nothing we can do with it, because no folder picker exists there; the app therefore points you to ohhi.nl on a laptop or desktop.

A folder from your computer

You pick the top folder or drag it onto the page. The browser first reads in all the files itself, which for a large folder can take half a minute, and after that we compare the list with what is already on Ohhi. You get a table: per folder how many photos are new, how many are already there, which period they span and how many megabytes will go out. Meanwhile we read the capture date from the header of each file, so the period per folder is right before you start.

The settings sit underneath. You decide whether the folder structure comes along or everything lands in one folder, whether a post is made per folder or per capture day, and whether the post date follows the capture date of the photos or simply becomes today. A quiet import is possible too: the photos then only appear in the folders and not in your family's timeline. The option to take the capture location out of the files is there just as it is in the ordinary upload window. What you choose we remember per source, so next time it is already set.

The Facebook or Instagram export

At Meta you request 'Download your information' in the Accounts Centre. Choose JSON as the format there rather than HTML, because the dates and captions cannot be read out of the HTML variant. You are sent one or more zip files, you unpack them into the same folder, and you pick that folder on the import page. The page works out by itself whether it is a Facebook or an Instagram export.

What happens next follows the layout of the source. An Instagram post stays one post, a carousel of ten photos included, and lands in a folder per year under Posts, Reels or Stories. On Facebook every post with photos becomes a post, with the post text as the caption, and every album becomes a folder. The date comes from the manifest: for Instagram the moment of posting, for Facebook the capture date Meta kept from the original EXIF. A photo from 2013 therefore sits at 2013 after the import, not at today.

From an export we read only the manifests of photos and videos. Messages, comments, likes, advertising and profile data we leave unread, and no account name is stored.

That is not a detail: an export like that holds your entire history on the platform, private messages included. It is of no use to us and we do not want it. How we handle the photos themselves is set out in why we'll never use your photos to train AI.

Importing twice gives no duplicate photos

Per source we keep track of which files are already in. Request a new export a year from now and pick it again, and only what was not there yet comes along, while new photos of an existing post are added to that post. If your tab drops out halfway, the next attempt picks up where it left off. On top of that we compute a hash of every file before it is uploaded, so a photo that already came in from your phone is recognised and only placed in the right folder.

What an export does not bring

The files in a Meta export are the compressed versions, on Instagram usually around 1080 pixels wide, and the EXIF has been stripped. If you still have the originals on a drive, import that folder instead of the export; the quality is better and the capture date comes from the file itself. Doing both gives you duplicates, because the bytes differ and the matching sees two different photos in them. Text posts without a photo, comments, tags and locations do not come along.

Prints that were never digital fall outside an export anyway. There is a scan mode in the app for those, described in how to scan old printed photos with your phone.

Where to start

In the upload window, below 'Choose files', sits the button 'Import a whole folder'; that takes you to the import page. Give the arrangement you want some thought first, because a folder you create now is not so easily dragged around once ten thousand photos sit in it; we wrote about that earlier in keeping twenty years of family photos tidy.

Your account on Facebook or Instagram simply stays where it is. An import copies what is there; what you do with the original afterwards is up to you. What Ohhi does and does not replace we set out on the page about a European alternative to Facebook. If you don't have an account yet, create one here; the first gigabyte is free.