I wondered about this. Is there some “cooling-off period” of known duration during which you can hide or delete a Timeline entry before notifications are sent?
Not that I’m aware of, I get push notifications when my wife posts stuff because FB was hiding her things a while back and I generally get them within a couple seconds. And things will stay in the notification feed even if they’re removed. The only workaround is to set it to private as an intermediate step, I’ve done that before and it works.
Nonsense. Facebook knows where you work if you add coworkers as friends. Facebook knows what your birthday is if anyone wishes you happy birthday on Facebook. Facebook knows where you were every time you get tagged in a picture that has location data (and any time their face recognition can find you, even if you’re not tagged).
You can certainly limit this by adding only a select few people, but you really can’t control what information other people give Facebook about you. And they can easily give quite a lot without thinking of it.
The OP has got this backwards. People get notifications when their friends post photos when they have adjusted their own settings to get notifications. It’s a pull, not a push.
Exactly. If someone has permission to see something you post they can set their alerts to let them know and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you don’t want people to see something, don’t post it. If you do want them to see it, let them figure out how much of your stuff they want to have show up on their feeds and adjust their settings accordingly.
The Facebook interface is premised on the idea that the stuff you are uploading is stuff that you would like to share with the people in your friends list, who, symmetrically, are interested in receiving updates about what you are uploading. Complaining that is difficult to not do that is like complaining that it is hard to drive screws with a hammer.
I honestly don’t understand. Are you saying that if your wife posted a picture in the normal way under normal settings, that her friends would get an email and phone SMS saying “septimus’s wife posted a picture!” I understand that it would probably show up in their newsfeeds, but I don’t see how anyone would get a notification outside of Facebook, unless she tagged them in the picture. Like if it was a picture of her and her friend Ashley, and she tagged it “me and Ashley at brunch!” and then Ashley might get an email or some other pop up notification depending on her settings. I’m looking at my phone right now and looking at Facebook notification settings, and even if I wanted to get email notifications of every time my friends posted a picture, I’m not sure how I would do that. Do they have settings set up so they get an email anytime anyone does anything on Facebook? And they get 100 emails a day alerting them that all that their Facebook friends are doing?
Anyway, what you found in how to post a picture without alerting everyone’s notifications isn’t by design, it’s a bug. Facebook designers assume that if you want to post a picture to everyone and let everyone see it, then you’d also be okay with it being in Newsfeeds and Notifications. And if you didn’t want everyone to see it, you’d either not post it, or post it in a closed setting so that only a select few could see.
No, the OP’s wife’s setting have nothing to do with what notifications her friends get, unless she posts a photo and specifically hides it from her friends, in which case they will not be able to see it, and will also, of course, not be notified of its existence.
Here’s the page where Rona showed me how to do what I wanted.
Here’s why she wanted to do it:
Do those of you defending Facebook think Rona was defeating the FB philosophy by not Notifying™ all her Friends™ that she was adding the watermarks? I don’t know if Rona knew about the change-all-permissions-to-Only-Me, later change-them-all-back workaround, but her way is much faster. Would adding the simple upload-but-don’t-post option be so much more difficult algorithmically than face recognition?
And what about my experience wanting to abort a Profile Picture change when I saw how FB intended to mangle it. Is there a workaround there besides Click-X-in-Upper-Right?
I keep thinking I should try Facebook, but as a private person, it sounds like by staying off it I’m Click-X-in-Upper-Right’ing a lot of headaches.
Exactly. Joey P’s statement is simply false. I have never had a Facebook account. I have never given Facebook any information about myself. Nevertheless, they clearly know an awful lot about me. For example, I routinely get spam from Facebook asking if I know persons X, Y, or Z. 90% of the time I do. Facebook knows my group of friends, family, and acquaintances even though I have never given it any information whatsoever. I’m not even sure how Facebook has my email address, but it does. (One of my addresses, anyway.)
Facebook undoubtedly knows my real name, what I look like, my city of residence, my job, my age, my marital status, and myriad other details that have either been given to it by others or that it can deduce from snippets of information that it has been given. None of this is information that I have given to Facebook.
I doubt that it’s any more difficult to program, but Facebook wants you to share things, and if there was an obvious option on how to only post things to your album but not let anyone know, more people would do it. I can understand your annoyance, but it makes sense why Facebook would have it that way. I’m not defending Facebook, I don’t think it’s the best company, but I can understand why they would do that.
So, Facebook thinks you should be more gregarious… “Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course you want everyone to see your kareoke! Don’t be such a sourpuss!”
Like when your mom would spot you sneaking up to bed when their friends came over for the late night cocktail party, and she grabbed you by the cheeks and made you show off for all their guests…
I don’t do FB but lately have been giving it a little thought. I post on a number of news websites but have to under an anonymous name. The problem lately is that many of my favourite sites have gone to FB only for posting.
So, in order to post on them I`ll just have to come up with a false but realistically sounding name in order to remain anonymous. How does John Smith sound?
Friends? Hmm, might have to just like all the business I frequent.
But I really have to wonder about people that appear to be addicted to FB. One woman at our work bragged about having over 600 friends. Funny thing is that just about everyone hated her!
It sounds like your wife wants to use Facebook as a photo storage space, when it’s not meant for that.
:smack: Wrong again. Try reading the thread.
The easiest solution would be to divorce your wife and marry someone who is already an expert at using Facebook.
Problem solved!!
I hate it when something that is completely free doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do!
TANSTAAFL. FB isn’t giving you anything for free; they are datamining you for all it’s worth while making it unnecessarily difficult to keep control of what you post and to whom.
JoeyP makes a fair point about not putting in what you don’t want others to see, but that should be obvious to anyone.
There’s much more if you can be bothered to look it up.
Divorcing Mrs. The_Best_thing_that_ever_happened_to_Septimus isn’t an option. 
And at least now we know two ways to accomplish the Upload_without_Post from a laptop. (Mrs. S uses a smartphone; maybe our son can show her how to do it on that device.)
Yes, I do realize FB’s goal is to make Mark Zuckerberg the richest man in the solar system. Perhaps its approach is optimal for that goal. That doesn’t mean I have to admire its interface.
I don’t like FB, free or not. I sure wish it were a paid service: my loved family members would use some other service and I’d have no need to cope with FB’s disgusting anal-retentive interface.
It took 38 posts for this inanity to appear. Does that break a record?