TechCrunch: “Facebook’s photo transfer tool is now available globally half a year on from an initial rollout in Europe, the company said today. The data portability feature enables users of the social network to directly port a copy of their photos to Google’s eponymous photo storage service via encrypted transfer, rather than needing to download and manually upload photos themselves — thereby reducing the hassle involved with switching to a rival service. Facebook users can find the option to “Transfer a copy of your photos and videos” under the Your Facebook Information settings menu. This is the same menu where the company has long enabled users to download a copy of a range of information related to their use of its service (including photos). However there’s little that can be done with that data dump. Whereas the direct photo transfer mechanism shrinks the friction involved in account switching. Facebook debuted the feature in Ireland at the back end of last year, going on to open it up to more international markets earlier this year and grant access to users in the US and Canada come April. Now all Facebook users can tap in — though the choice of where you can port your photos remains limited to Google Photos. So it’s not the kind of data portability that’s of any help to startup services (yet). Facebook has said support for other services is being built out. However this requires collaborating developers to build the necessary adapters for photos APIs. Which in turn depends on wider participation in an underpinning open source effort, called the Data Transfer Project (DTP)…”