Importing from Facebook

This page walks you through bringing someone's Facebook photos and posts into a memorial on Northstar. It is meant to be followed step by step while you do it.

If you have not yet downloaded their export from Facebook, or you are not sure whether to do that before or after memorialising the account, read what to do with someone's Facebook account when they die first. The short version: get the export out while you can still log in, because once Facebook is told the person has died it can lock the account and nobody gets back in.

Three things to know before you start, because they are the questions most people have:

• Nothing is added to the memorial automatically. You see everything first and choose what to keep, one item at a time.
• You do not need to unzip the file or understand its contents. You upload the zip exactly as Facebook gives it to you.
• Uploading and reviewing are free. Adding items to the memorial needs Keep on that memorial: either the memorial is kept forever, or its owner has Keep.

Step 1: get the export from Facebook

Inside Facebook, use the feature called "Download your information". The search box in the settings will find it, as Facebook moves where it lives.

When you set it up:

• Choose HTML, not JSON, when it asks for a format. HTML is the one we are built to read. If you have already exported JSON, try it anyway, but if anything looks wrong, export again as HTML.
• Set the media quality to high, or the photos come back small and there is no way to improve them afterwards.
• You can include the whole history or pick a date range. Either is fine.

The archive takes a while to build, sometimes hours. Facebook then gives you a download link that expires after a few days, so save the file somewhere you can find it. It will be a single zip file.

Step 2: upload the zip to Northstar

1. Open the memorial you are importing into and go to the page where you review contributions.
2. Find the Import from Facebook card and select Open import.
3. Select Import a file and choose the zip Facebook gave you. Leave it zipped.

Large files are fine. A full export can be hundreds of megabytes, and the upload is built for that. You will see it move through preparing, uploading and reading. When it finishes reading, it takes you straight to the review screen.

Step 3: choose what to keep

A Facebook export is mostly noise. Alongside the person's own posts and photos, it carries reshared news articles, links, "is now friends with" entries and pages they liked. We set all of that aside and show you what is actually theirs: the things they wrote and the photos they shared.

On the review screen you go through these one by one:

• Add the things you want on the memorial. Each one is published to the memorial page as you add it.
• Remove anything you added by mistake. Remove is a true undo, and the item goes back to the list so you can add it again later if you change your mind.

There is no rush and nothing is final. You can leave the review screen and come back to it, and you can keep adding over more than one sitting.

Step 4: finish

Once you have added at least one thing, a Go to memorial button appears. Use it to see how the page looks with the imported memories in place. Anyone you invite can then add their own photos and messages alongside yours, and they do not need a Facebook account, or any account at all.

Common questions

Will anything be posted without me seeing it first?

No. Nothing from the export reaches the memorial until you add it yourself.

My export is very large. Is that a problem?

No. The upload handles full exports of several hundred megabytes.

It could not read my file, or nothing came through.

The most common cause is the format. Go back to Facebook and download the information again as HTML, then upload the new zip.

The Facebook download link expired before I saved it.

Start the "Download your information" request again. Facebook rebuilds the archive and gives you a fresh link.

The photos look low quality.

This is set at export time and cannot be fixed afterwards. Re-export from Facebook with the media quality set to high.

I do not have access to the account.

Then the in-app upload is not open to you, because it needs the export, and the export needs you to be logged in. The Facebook account guide covers the remaining routes, including the request form for a verified family member or the executor.

Do the people I invite need a Facebook account?

No. Contributors never need a Facebook account, and never need a Northstar account either.

Still stuck

If something here did not work, get in touch and tell us what happened at which step. It helps to know whether you exported as HTML or JSON, and roughly how large the file is.

Last reviewed: 24 June 2026