I’m doing a 365 challenge at the moment. A photo a day for a whole year. It’s been fun, except when it comes to Facebook photo management. I didn’t realise until about 100 days in, that Facebook was lumping all of my photos together into one post. People visiting my page would see nothing, except for “David Gray Photography added 100 photos to the album ‘365 Challenge 2015′”. This was very frustrating, because I was working my butt off to post content, but Facebook wasn’t showing it. I resorted to “double-sharing” my post. I’d upload the photo, but tick “Hide from News Feed”, then I’d go to the photo, hit “Share” and share it with my own page. It seemed to work, but I knew there had to be a better solution.

After some more research, I discovered that there is a “Change Date” button in the uploader. By default, Facebook sets the date of the photo to the date you created the album (i.e. January 1st). This might work for photos of a birthday party or a wedding, where it all happens on the one date, but for a steady stream of pictures over the course of a year, it was not good.

Fortunately, Facebook gives you an option to set the dates after upload. To do it with 180 photos would take forever, so I created a bookmarklet which would find and store the month and day (Facebook gives you this info as a tooltip, which is very handy), simulate a click on the “Change Date” link, set the day / month boxes as necessary, simulate a click on the “Save” button, then simulate a click on the “Next” button. This essentially allows me to repeatedly click to set the date for all of my photos. 100 photos in, only 90 to go. Too easy!

If you’d like to use this bookmarket for yourself, drag the link below, up to your Bookmarks toolbar:

Automatically change Facebook photo date

If you’d like the source to inspect and change, check out the JSFiddle. As this was written for myself, the code is going to be messy and all over the place, but I didn’t have time to write neat code.

If you’d like to turn the source into a bookmarklet, or you’d like to write your own, check out this bookmarklet generating site. Put some code in, hit “Convert” and you’ve got a bookmarklet, ready to drag to your toolbar. Just note that Facebook blocks external scripts, so you can’t use jQuery on code destined for Facebook.

Happy renaming!