Your profile picture is a window to your Facebook profile.
With so many Facebook users active on the platform these days, many of whom have the same name, profile pictures allow potential friends to type a name into the search bar and sift through all the results – pinpointing the individual they are looking for via their image.
What’s more, it becomes a way to showcase who you are – both to those who know you now, to those who are old friends, and to people who you haven’t met yet.
Your profile pictures is, in essence, a visual form of online identification, giving you the power to choose which image people see whenever your content pops up on their Facebook feed.
But what about when you want to strip your Facebook presence right back and remove all visual signs of your profile from the platform? Is there a way of making your profile picture private so that only a specific audience can see it?
Luckily there is – and we’ve worked out the exact process you need to follow, so that you don’t have to.
3 Steps to Make Your Profile Picture Private
- Click on the menu button in the bottom right hand corner of your Facebook screen and select your name at the top of the menu to open your profile page
- Click directly on your profile picture and select ‘See Profile Picture’
- With the image open in full screen mode, select the three dots in the top right hand corner of the photo and then select ‘Edit Privacy’
This will open a privacy menu that lets you change the audience and visibility of your profile picture.
‘Public’ allows anyone to see your profile picture regardless of your privacy settings across the rest of your account. ‘Friends’ means that only those who you accept as friends can see your profile image, while ‘Only Me’ hides your profile picture completely.
What Users See When Your Profile Picture Is Private
If and when you change the privacy settings on your profile picture, those who are not allowed to see your photo will instead see the greyed out silhouette that’s synonymous with a blocked account or a photo-less profile.
Editing the privacy of your profile picture and hiding it from public view means that your identity is protected on Facebook and that users who you do not know will not be able to identify you easily.
We hope this helps and highlights just how many of Facebook’s settings are geared towards protecting users.
