I thought I should do this as I still get the occasional email asking about the hack

  • The original hack to see private profile’s albums no longer works as facebook have blocked up that hole. It was done using the photo_comments.php page
  • This userscript allows you to see some of the pictures that people in your primary network are tagged in.  This does NOT show ALL their pictures, but it shows at least some.  Don’t listen to the people in the comments that says it doesn’t work; I use it and I can say it works great. (Don’t email me or the userscript’s creator about how to install it, just use google)
  • The teaser trick still works.

EDIT!! WAAAAAAA :( facebook patched it! gosh that was quicker than i expected. the hack no longer works on people with private profiles. there’s nothing that will work at the moment, but if anything should come up in the future… i might not consider posting it on the net haha! In case anyone is wondering, from what i can tell it took around 11 hours from the time i posted this to when the hole was patched.

The original post follows:

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So here it is.

First you need the person’s facebook ID and you can get that from the ‘Add as Friend’ Button. Then type this in your browser address:

http://www.facebook.com/photo_comments.php?id=[IDNUMBER]

you’ll then get a list of all the photos that that person has in public albums which have comments on. Upon clicking on one of the pictures, you can then access the whole of that album by using the Prev | Next navigation buttons or by using this greasemonkey script to see the whole album on one page http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9580

Remember, this only works if the user has not set any privacy settings on their albums. Also remember that their friends are also likely to have pictures of them so use the url manipulation on them too and see what you can find.

P.s. There is no greasemonkey script because i couldn’t be bothered to make one

Firstly, allow me to say that this is NOT the hack that’ll get you albums from private profiles. It’s just something that’s quick and easy to do and it’s nice and simple :)

You know when on someone’s profile you see ‘View Photos of X (405)’ and you click to see them all and you can only see something like 340? Well there’s a way to see at least a few of those hidden pictures.

Get their facebook ID and go to: http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?subj=[Facebook ID]

You’ll now see a page that shows all the albums they’re tagged in. Unfortunately the photos that are in private albums are not clickable, but you can still enlarge that one thumbnail of that album. The filename of the thumbnail is something like: aXXXXXXXX_XXXXXX_XXXX.jpg and to access the fullsize image you just got to copy and paste that url into your address bar and change that little ‘a’ to an ‘n’.

This will only work on public profiles in your networks and it will not allow you to see every picture of them as they may have more than one picture in those private albums and you can only see one in the thumbnail

i seriously doubt facebook would fix this so go ahead and use it for however long you want

NOTE: I’m currently in the process of writing a greasemonkey script for the previously-announced hack and it should be finished soon :)

If I tell you all how to do the hack, facebook will plug the hole within hours albeit giving me some (unwanted) publicity for a few weeks. I mean, you only have to google for Byron Ng to see how much publicity that caused for him and facebook fixed that hack very quickly. So really, releasing the hack on here is only going to mean the hole is going to be fixed instantaneously. Also I wish not to cause a huge ruckus for people’s privacy as well as the issue of stalkers and online pervs :P

So i was thinking, how about people suggest Facebook IDs of celebrities, and I’ll see what I can dig up.

Suggestions on how to handle the method of this hack will be very much appreciated as well. I’m definitely not after making money with this information nor with the pictures I find, it’s just I’m liking the idea of finding a bug, and exploiting it until I’m bored, then releasing the method to the public.

Oh and remember, I can only view the albums of that facebook ID. I can’t sort by the photos that they’re tagged in as that’s not how this hack works. celebrity friend IDs will be helpful too :)

email facebookalbumviewer@googlemail.com with your suggestions and facebook IDs

So, i’ve been able to access the albums of facebook users for a number of days now. It doesn’t matter if they have a private or public profile, nor does it matter where in the world they live or have their facebook account located. In most cases I can access a large number of photos from their albums using a simple little hack.

As far as i can tell, no one else knows this trick and the last time that facebook users’ privacy was broken, it hit the news the world over.

Time will come when I will document this hack, but for now here’s proof that anyone’s albums can be accessed at this moment in time. For journalists that request, I can also show a sample of what I can retrieve from a celebrity’s facebook account given their facebook ID.

Here is an album from Mark Zuckerberg’s profile:

Here is an album from UK celebrity Emily Parr: