With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms for sharing photos, updates, and connecting with friends and family. While many enjoy the ability to share life events and milestones openly, others prefer to maintain more privacy when it comes to their Facebook presence.
One way to control the privacy settings for your Facebook profile is to make your featured photos private. Your featured photos appear at the top of your Facebook profile and timeline, so setting these to private allows you to choose who can view them.
What are Facebook featured photos?
Facebook featured photos, also known as cover photos, are the large banner images that appear at the top of your profile and timeline. You can upload photos, graphics, or other images to your featured photo section to customize and personalize your Facebook presence.
Your featured photos act as a cover image for your profile. Unlike your profile picture which is small and circular, the featured photo spans the entire width of your page, allowing you to upload wide panoramic shots or stylish graphics.
When someone visits your profile, your featured photo is one of the first things they’ll see, making it a great way to express your personality, interests, or connections through images.
Why make your featured photos private?
There are a few key reasons you may want to make your Facebook featured photos private:
- Privacy – Making your featured photos private allows you to control who can view and access them. This helps protect personal photos from being seen by unintended audiences.
- Security – Private photos help prevent others from misusing, sharing, or spreading your images without consent.
- Selective sharing – You can choose to show certain featured images only to your friends, family, or customized groups rather than the entire public.
- Professional presence – If you use Facebook for business, you may want to make your featured photos private to maintain a professional persona.
In summary, setting your featured photos to private gives you greater control over these highly visible profile images. It helps safeguard your privacy, security, and ability to selectively share parts of your Facebook presence.
How to make featured photos private
Making your Facebook featured photos private is easy to do through the Facebook app or desktop site:
Via Mobile App
1. Open the Facebook app and tap on your profile icon in the bottom right (on iOS) or top right (on Android)
2. Tap on the featured photo area to open the photo editor
3. Tap on the audience selector (globe icon) to change who can see the photo
4. Choose “Only Me” to make it fully private
Via Desktop
1. Go to facebook.com and click on your profile icon in the top right
2. Hover over your featured photo and click on “Update Featured Photo”
3. Click on the audience selector (globe icon) and choose “Only Me”
4. Click “Save Changes” to apply the private setting
Once you set a featured photo’s audience to “Only Me”, that photo will only be visible to you when you view your profile while logged in. Others will not be able to see it.
Other Facebook privacy tips
In addition to making your featured photos private, here are some other privacy best practices for Facebook:
- Review all your privacy settings under “Settings & Privacy” to control who can see your posts, friends list, and more.
- Limit old posts visibility – This prevents people from seeing your posts from a certain date range.
- Turn off search engine indexing in your privacy settings to keep your profile out of Google/Bing searches.
- Unfriend or block people you no longer wish to share information with.
- Use friend lists to share certain posts with only specific groups rather than all friends.
- Limit ad targeting and opt out of certain types of ad tracking for greater privacy.
Who can see your featured photos?
When setting a featured photo’s audience, you have several options to choose from:
| Audience | Who Can See |
|---|---|
| Public | Anyone including people off of Facebook |
| Friends | Your Facebook friends only |
| Friends except… | Your Facebook friends except people or lists you exclude |
| Specific friends | Only the Facebook friends you pick and choose |
| Only me | Just you |
Choosing “Only me” limits visibility of that featured photo completely to yourself. This is the most private option.
Alternatively, you can customize visibility by selecting specific friend lists or groups of people. This allows you to show certain featured photos to only your close family, high school friends, coworkers, etc.
Conclusion
Making your Facebook featured photos private is an easy and effective way to gain more control over your privacy. By setting the audience to “Only me”, you can ensure those highly visible banner images are kept fully private.
Combined with a review of your broader privacy settings, limiting featured photo access helps safeguard your personal information, security, and online reputation. Just tap or click the audience selector when uploading or editing a featured photo and choose “Only me” for optimal privacy.