If you often post photos from Instagram to Facebook, here’s how to customize the privacy settings when posting those photos to Facebook.
When you post something on Facebook, you can customize who can see that post. For example, you can let your friends see it, but leave out certain people if you want. I do this sometimes when I post something that my super conservative family wouldn’t quite agree with.
However, when you take a photo on Instagram and post it to Facebook via the Instagram app, it doesn’t use your customized privacy settings by default and instead sends that photo to all your friends.
Fortunately, you can change this and force Instagram to use your custom privacy settings whenever you want to post an Instagram photo on Facebook. You would think there would be a setting for this in the Instagram app, especially since Facebook owns Instagram, but you actually have to dig deep into your Facebook settings to set it up.
Here’s how to change Instagram privacy settings on Facebook.
Changing Instagram Privacy Settings
If you have customized your privacy settings on Facebook, the same settings will not be transferred to Instagram when you go to post a photo from the app to Facebook. It seems like a big flaw considering Facebook owns Instagram, but it’s still there.
This means that if you normally post something on Facebook and only allow a certain group of Facebook friends to see it, this won’t be the case for Instagram photos you post to Facebook unless you manually customize the settings for it individually.
So, if you want to post your Instagram photos on Facebook and only certain Facebook friends can see them, you need to customize Instagram’s privacy settings separately.
This is pretty easy to do, but the settings are a bit deep in Facebook so you’ll have to dig through them. Fortunately, this step-by-step guide will show you the way.
First, start by going to Facebook’s website in your web browser (you need to do this on a computer). From there, navigate to the little arrow icon towards the top-right corner of the webpage. Click on it and select it from the drop-down menu.
On the next page, click on the left sidebar.
You will see a selection of apps you have connected to Facebook. Instagram has to be one of them.
Click on the slightly faded gear icon just below the word. This will give you a popup with more settings.
It is the first setting, which is the setting you want. Go ahead and click the dropdown button and select .
From here you can customize who can see your Instagram posts. For me, I will choose any of my Facebook friends to see my Instagram posts that I share on Facebook, except for a few, I enter their names in the section named.
After you’re done, click it. From now on, any Instagram photo you share on Facebook will use these privacy settings. Unfortunately, you can’t customize these settings instantly with every new Instagram photo you post to Facebook, but it’s definitely better than nothing.
Hopefully in the future Instagram will come with better options in the app where users can change the privacy settings for their Facebook posts, but for now that’s how you do it. I’m sure we all have a Facebook friend who comments on everything and it’s a little annoying, but we really can’t unfriend them because they notice so quickly.
