VincentCheung.ca Blog » FaceDown

FaceDown “Cease and Desist”

Vincent Cheung — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:02:34 +0000

Facebook has demanded that FaceDown be taken down as it violates Facebook’s Terms of Use. FaceDown, in its current state, is no longer available.

I do believe that what FaceDown does (downloads photos from Facebook) is highly useful and I believe that information and data should not be locked inside one proprietary system. If in the future, Facebook allows this functionality of data portability, then FaceDown may reappear in one form or another.

FaceDown 1.4.1

Vincent Cheung — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:31:20 +0000

This is a minor update that fixes a weird url redirection thing that Facebook has recently added that wasn’t handled by previous versions of FaceDown (eg. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/photo_search.php?id=28100486 is actually the Facebook homepage, but redirects using Javascript to http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?id=28100486). As an added bonus, I added an extra box in the interface that shows the URLs that have been downloaded so far.

FaceDown 1.4.1 Release Notes
June 6, 2008

Fixed downloading errors in version 1.4
Added additional downloading status information
Improved the interface for small resolution screens

FaceDown 1.4

Vincent Cheung — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:03:09 +0000

After much delay, FaceDown version 1.4 is finally out! I’ve neglected this project a bit because lately I have been working on another project. In the last little while, facebook made some minor changes and broke the previous version of FaceDown and I had to fix it so that people would stop emailing me about it. I also took the chance to push out a few other updates that have been done for a while, but just didn’t make it out of the beta testing until now.

There are a few interface changes in this version, most noticeably, the removal of the download directory text field since the save directory is now requested when the download button is pressed. The caption saved inside of the photo (in the metadata) is now compatible with the Windows Vista Photo Gallery, iPhoto, Mac OS X Preview, in addition to the previously supported Picasa and other programs. Non-English characters are still a bit tricky because there is no standard (at least with IPTC) and each program does things slightly differently. Currently, the webpage output shows the caption exactly the same as in facebook and the metadata caption correctly shows non-english characters in iPhoto and Mac OS X’s Preview. Also, if you upload photos downloaded through FaceDown to Flickr (using the web interface), the caption, even non-English ones, appear in Flickr automatically! A few under the hood changes were made which should improve the stability of the downloading procedure. Lastly, as a final bonus, the installation of FaceDown on all platforms is now a lot nicer than before!

FaceDown 1.4 Release Notes
June 1, 2008

Fixed downloading errors in version 1.3
Better support for photo captions in Windows Vista and Mac OS X
Better support for non-English photo captions (Mac OS X Preview and iPhoto and Flickr)
Changed “Overwrite existing files” to “Skip existing files”
Added right-click menu for copying and pasting
Renamed folders from “you” to “My Photos”
Enhanced downloading procedure
Improved program installation

Welcome to the FaceDown blog

Vincent Cheung — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:32:10 +0000

I decided to start a blog for FaceDown to track the progress of the program, keep you guys updated, and to get feedback from you. If you have something to say, feel free to say it here!