I managed to get an invitation to Google+ before overcrowding forced Google to put the velvet ropes back-up soon after. In my quest to share photos on the new social network, I wanted an easy way to import my existing Facebook photos without pressing Right Click > Save As for hours. Thankfully, someone I follow on Google+ already had the same thought and found a solution.

Pick & Zip is a simple backup tool that downloads pictures from Facebook without the hassle of having to download photos individually. And it’s useful for more than just exporting the photos to another network like I have. What if you need to download Facebook photos for offline storage and viewing, or creating a slideshow for a party? Pick & Zip lets users do that by downloading a few photos, an entire album, or their entire collection, and archives it into a Zip file.

Anyone who has used Facebook also knows that many photos of you stored on the website were posted by friends and family. Pick & Zip takes care of those photos as well. Users can start mass downloads of Facebook photos in which they are tagged or entire albums from their friends.

UPDATE: Looking for a more direct approach? There’ a clever app called Move2Picasa that will do exactly what the name implies. The user just  needs to authorize a Facebook account by visiting Move2Picasa.com and then wait as the app begins downloading and uploading your albums to Picasa.

There’s no way to select which albums because Move2Picasa grabs entire photo library, so you could be there for a while. You also will have a long time to wait for the process to start because it was featured on TechCrunch and was bombarded with requests, so there’s a rather long line.

Here’s how to do it with Pick & Zip.

1. Visit Picknzip.com and authorize the app through Facebook Connect. (You’ll need to give it permission in order for things to work.)
2. To download your photos, click “Find My Photos” and click on the “Albums” section.
   
3. Hover over the desired album and click the down arrow icon that looks like this.
   
4. Click ZIP to download all photos stored in that album.
5. Then extract that file to have all the photos stored on your computer.

To download only certain photos, click on the album and then click on each image that you wish to save. Once you’ve selected your image(s), press the download button above and click “Download my Selection” on the following page.

To download all Tagged photos, click on the “Tagged” tab and press the “Select All” button. Be sure to uncheck those photos that your oversharing friends tagged you in even though you don’t actually appear in them.

To download a Friends, Groups, or Pages photo, click on the tab on the left and follow the same instructions laid out in the previous explanations.

Now you’ve got an easy path to grab all the photos that you need. And if you’re not comfortable with the app continuing to have access to your information, it’s easy to remove the link between Facebook and Pick & Zip. Visit the Pick&Zip Facebook page and click “Remove” from the bottom left corner.

Thanks, Jake!