Per Request – Sharing with a group on Facebook

In the comments on that last post, Steven asks:

Mike, can you post instructions on how to post a pic to fb and restrict it so only 10 of my 100 friends can see it? ’cause I certainly haven’t figured that out yet.

Fair enough, I’ll show you how I did something similar, and then discuss some other options.

After going to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, I wanted to share some photos of the event, and my family members, with just my family on Facebook.

First, I created a Friend list named Family. From the account menu, select the option to Edit Friends. Right at the top of that screen, there’s a button to “Create a List”.

I created a list named Family, and added my wife, my in-laws, my siblings  and their spouses, my cousins, etc. Once that was complete, I went over to the photos section, and created a new album for the birthday party. With the new album created, I clicked the link to “Edit Album”, which brings up a window where you can set the name, a description, the location and at the very bottom, who it is visible to. It will pick up your default setting from your privacy settings, in my case “Friends Only”, however it can be changed. The drop down will list other defaults, but also has a Customize option. In the new window that opens, again select the drop down next to Friends Only and select the Specific people option In the text box begin typing Family, until that shows up as an option. Select that, and the album is now only viewable to friends that I have added to that list.

That was my preference, because I had already started down the path of creating friend lists and trying to filter my newsfeed using those lists. (A feature that Facebook took out of the iPhone app, and has made much more hidden in the web version than it used to be, by the way!) However, you do not really even need to create lists if you don’t want to. Again, in the Custom sharing you could simply type the name of each friend you want to share the album with, and add them, or you can do the opposite and either create a list, or individuals, that you want to block from seeing it.

BTW, these same privacy settings are available for any status message, shared link, etc. Just click that little lock icon next to the Share button. The only place you do not have this option is on individual photos. The privacy is an album level setting only, as far as I can tell.

So, with some planning and a little digging around, you can get the same functionality within Facebook. I purposely haven’t mentioned Groups here either, because I don’t have any experience with using Groups and don’t know exactly how it works, but I imagine you could do something similar. The one big difference is that people will know they’ve been added to a group, they won’t know if you add them to a list.

Hope that helps!

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