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I'd like to add some new people as Facebook friends so that they can see baby pictures, but not the rest of my posts and other items.

Going forward, this is easy, as I can just add them to appropriate lists, e.g.:

  • Baby pictures get the standard Friends privacy
  • Everything else gets a "social friends" list privacy

However, I would also like to prevent the new people from seeing old stuff, which all have the Friends privacy. Approaches that don't seem like they would work include:

  1. Go through all old posts and reset the privacy of each to the new "social friends" list. With several years of Facebook membership, that's prohibitively tedious.

  2. Add the new people to the Restricted list. However, it doesn't seem possible to share with the "Restricted" list unless the post is public, which I don't want. (Even if I also add people to a "baby" list in addition to Restricted, choosing the "baby" list yields the note "baby, except for Restricted".)

  3. Use the Manage Past Post Visibility tool suggested in this answer. However, the help given when in the introductory screen implies it can only reset old posts to Friends, rather than a specific list.

I do not have Timeline, but I'd be willing to turn it on if that helps.

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  • What I ended up doing was to do the going-forward arrangement, and then work back a couple of months, making corrections manually. Better than nothing. There is also the issue of my comments on others' posts being visible. In my case, I think this is "good enough", though I do wish there was a better solution available (without programmering).
    – Reid
    May 24, 2012 at 2:51
  • That sounds like a job for Google Plus. Jan 25, 2016 at 0:09

1 Answer 1

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It appears there's no way to do this, unfortunately.

What I ended up doing was to do the going-forward arrangement, and then work back a couple of months, making corrections manually (#1). Better than nothing. There is also the issue of my comments on others' posts being visible. In my case, I think this is "good enough", though I do wish there was a better solution available (without programmering).

It might be possible to use the Facebook API to achieve this, but I didn't see anything ready-made with some quick searching.

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