Click the little privacy icon next to the timestamp, and select “Only Me”. Now, with as much speed as you can muster, navigate to your timeline. Choose a photo to use as your avatar, and crop it appropriately. Your success rate decreases as more friends are online.įirst, just upload your profile picture as normal by navigating to your profile and clicking on your avatar. This requires a little bit of speed, as you can imagine, and I don’t recommend trying this method at peak Facebook times.
This method involves uploading your profile picture, and then quickly going onto your timeline and marking the notification as private before anyone else can see it. It’s not the most sophisticated method, but if you choose the right time to do it, and if you don’t have an enormous friends list, it should work out for you. This is the most self-explanatory option, and it’s probably one that you’ve thought of before. Cross your fingers, though! Option 1: Beat them to it Until Facebook implements an official way to do this, there’s honestly no way to be 100 percent sure that you’ll be able to do this. They’re not always completely effective, so I apologize in advance if they don’t work for you. Nonetheless, there are a couple of ways around this issue. Avatars don’t serve the same purpose as timeline photos, and I don’t get why Facebook decided to treat them as timeline photos.
I do know, however, that it’s really embarrassing to update your avatar for professional purposes, and have someone potentially click on that avatar and see a dozen comments from your grandparents. Although you’re able to upload photos to Facebook privately, once you designate that photo as your avatar, it’s made public again. One of the most glaring imperfections, currently, is the inability to update your profile picture without notifying anyone on your friend’s list. Facebook is generally pretty good at allowing you to configure your privacy settings, but there are still a few imperfections. Just because you want to be able to swap recipes with your old high school basketball coach doesn’t mean that you want the entire Internet to know everything about you. However, the key word in that statement is “certain” aspects. You’re volunteering to share certain aspects of your lives with people that they aren’t entitled to seeing. I mean, it’s already a social media website. “Facebook” and “privacy” are terms that don’t seem to really go together.